Thinking back on Germany

I'm still rolling over our German toy-buying trip. One image that comes to mind repeatedly is one of browsing through Obletter, a German toy store, and a small chain apparently. We visited one in Munich and one in Nuremberg. The store didn't bowl us over in terms of merchandising or overall aesthetic, but the selection was incredible. So many things that we had seen at the Nuremberg show that appear to be German toy 'staples', but that you never see in the U.S.

The most striking, thing, however, was a conspicuous absence of licenses. If you go into 90% of toy stores in the States, you are likely to come across merchandise plastered with Dora, Spongebob, Barbie, Bratz, Baby Einstein, and so on and so on, ad nauseum. But in this store, the only licensed goods to be found (with a few rare exceptions) were the diecast Mercedes, Volkswagens and other toy vehicles. It was so refreshing to see...well, just toys. Certainly, these toys may be the products of marketing and focus groups as much as many other consumer goods are, but they are, in the end, basic toys. But in America, we get these:

You even need a Dora shelf on which to store all of your Dora toys! What a marketing machine. We noticed, too, that the Pampers we bought in Germany, which in the U.S. would have Pooh or some other such character on them, had no characters save a little tiger or giraffe. And then there's the food -- using characters to market food to kids in Europe is illegal. Novel concept!

Unfortunately, the U.S. is exporting its demand for licenses to the rest of the world, and I wonder how long even the Obletters of the world will be able to stave off the onslaught.