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.

On non-american interests

After walking through 2 massive halls (0f 12 total halls at Toy Fair) yesterday, one of model trains and one of remote control planes, boats, helicopters, cars & everything else, I have been thinking about the European demand for this type of product versus our own. Then, I ran into a former colleague today in the aisles of Nuremberg, and he commented that most Europeans have much more free time than we have in the US of A. They work 35 hours a week (as opposed to our 50 or 60) and have long, cold winters to sit inside and build their train sets, cars and planes.

And so, after their long winters, they emerge in the Spring to race their fast cars and fly their huge helicopters (this argument doesn't work for trains, unless we're talking about huge garden trains in Switzerland, but anyhow...). The hobby arts are dying off in the U.S. As a child, I was hugely into model trains, with subscription to Model Railroader magazine and the whole works (of course, I was a little nerd...). But now, you would be hard pressed to get an 11 or 12 year old American boy excited about a train set. And we built many model cars and planes, but now most big box stores are devoid of good car model kits. Maybe it's the toxic glue and paint, or maybe it's a lack of patience, I'm not sure.

Well, that's our observation of the day. Guten nacht from Germany.