It will be a very video Christmas.
Toy and game retailers expect video games, computer games and DVDs to lead the way for holiday gift-giving this season.
“The biggest consumer products this season will be video games,” said Sean McGowan, co-founder of PlayDate and toy industry analyst at Gerard Klauer Mattison. “Videogames are a bigger business than Hollywood.”
However, traditional toy sales are expected to be lackluster for the holiday season.
“It will be a somewhat subdued year,” McGowan said. “For toys it will be a flat year. There will be a lot of growth in videogames,” taking away from categories like small electronics and clothing.
The toys that are expected to be best sellers for the holiday season run the gamut from Rapunzel Barbie to Harry Potter playsets to the Spider-Man Dual Action Web Blaster. All of these were showcased at PlayDate 2002, a media show highlighting the top toys for the coming holiday season, held yesterday at the Metropolitan Pavilion.
Retro brands are making a massive comeback in the toy industry. The brand Care Bears, big in the 1980s, is celebrating its 20th anniversary and are available to consumers for the first time in over 10 years. Cabbage Patch babies and kids are also making a come-back.
“Retro is big with some kind of new twist,” McGowan said. “There’s a lot of equity in those retro toys,” with parents who may have played with them the first time around. Still, “to a five-year-old it’s new.”
Retailers, in an effort to combat the lackluster projections, are doing things to set their stores apart.
“Stores are looking for exclusives,” McGowan said, like Toys ‘R’ Us with Cabbage Patch Kids or K-B Toys with the Craftsman tool toys, because “failure has a pretty high cost.”
“My First Craftsman Toys,” manufactured through a license from Sears, are toy versions of the real tools offered at Sears.
“It’s the first time Sears has gone outside for licensing,” said David Novitsky, vice-president for merchandising, K-B Toys.