Small World plans mass market push
By Cliff Annicelli -- Gifts and Dec, 7/14/2009 2:38:00 PM
CARSON, Calif.—Small World Toys, the decades-old specialty toy manufacturer, is looking to reignite its business by making a play for more mass market sales under new top management.
The initiative, which will begin this fall and flower fully in 2010, is the key component of a revitalization effort for Small World spearheaded by new chairman and CEO Larry Nusbaum, operating partner of the toymaker’s new owner, New York-based Vertex Capital.
To make it work, Nusbaum plans to take a page from the play book of famed direct-to-consumer marketer Ronco Acquisition Corp., the company founded by inventor extraordinaire Ron Popeil (of Pocket Fisherman fame) and for which Nusbaum currently serves as chairman and CEO, by selling new impulse-oriented lines of Small World toys via television and in the mass market.
“There’s not a lot of hot out there [in the toy business] unless you’re licensed, so we’re going to take stuff and put it on TV so that it will create some initiative for consumers to buy,” Nusbaum tells Playthings. He admits that "a TV infomercial approach is a very different approach for the toy industry" but points out that the toys that have been marketed in that way, "were on TV a lot, and I assume that gave them a lot of mass appeal.”
Nusbaum says that 99 percent of the to-be-TV-promoted toys under Small World’s various existing brands—Ryan’s Room, Gertie Ball (pictured) and Neurosmith among them—will be “completely different or have a completely different brand and value proposition” than what’s sold through specialty toy and gift retailers. “You won’t see the same product in Costco that you see in [specialty],” Nusbaum explains. “And the quality differential will be clearly denotable. It’ll be a very different message.”
The lines of TV promoted, mass-bound product will be “heavily promoted and marketed with millions of dollars in TV and radio and print,” Nusbaum says, with a goal of “really attack[ing] that channel very aggressively in 2010 ... In October we plan on being very aggressive in Dallas.”
Internally, very little has changed within Small World, according to Nusbaum, since Vertex’s purchase of the toymaker in June for an undisclosed sum. Most of the company’s top execs remain in place, a new CFO will be named in short order, and its rep groups are unchanged. A New York office will open but the company will continue to be based in California.
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