Toy specialist The Entertainer said playground crazes such as fidget spinners and Fingerlings were helping it buck a downturn in the toy trade.
The amount spent on toys and the number of toys sold is down sharply on last year, but The Entertainer said its like-for-like sales were running level with 2016 over the most recent six months.
The squeeze on the toy industry came to the fore this week after Danish toymaker Lego announced it was cutting 1,400 jobs after suffering its first drop in sales in more than a decade.
In the US it was reported that Toys R Us has hired a team of lawyers to come up with a plan to deal with its $5bn (£3.8bn) debt pile. Fling for bankruptcy is said to be among the options.
“People think [toy retailers] are up the creek without a paddle but we are not,” said Gary Grant, managing director of The Entertainer. “If you have got the right products there is business to be done.”
In the run up to the summer holidays schools started banning fidget spinners as the playground mania spilled over into the classroom. The palm-sized spinners consist of a ball bearing that sits in a three-pronged plastic device that can be flicked and spun. But their contraband status only intensified the spinners’ appeal. The Entertainer has sold 500,000 of them this year.
Grant said Fingerlings – pocket-sized interactive baby monkeys that cling to your finger – are now giving spinners a run for their pocket money. The retailer said it had sold 60,000 of the £15 toys since the fad began.
At the start of 2017 a number of high-profile toy manufacturers, including Lego, hiked prices after last year’s Brexit-related devaluation of sterling pushed up the cost of imported goods. UK toy retailers rang up £3.5bn of sales in 2016 but the 2% drop over the first eight months of 2017 masks a much steeper fall in physical sales, with the number of units sold dropping 11%.
“We’re delighted with this year’s performance so far particularly having had to face into increased promotional pressure and exchange-rate fluctuations,” said Grant.
The 5% drop in sales reported by Lego was worse than the wider market. Grant said: “Lego money is being spent on other things. There has been a whole number of high-profile crazes which have been selling amazingly well. Children are buying different products.”
