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.

Whirlwind tour back to home base

Well, sorry for the long delay in posting here. The last 10 days have been crazy ones with sporadic internet access. We will be brief, because it is 2:00 am in the time zone we are accustomed to, and the more I write, the less sense I will make!

So we stayed in Slovakia, interviewing great new employees for Kids on Third Street and Home on Third Street as well as for a friend's coffee shop and other business endeavors in Lakeside. Then, Ryan was off to New York for the NY Toy Fair, Feb 11th through 14th. Unlike last year, there were no piles of snow to contend with, mercifully. I have to say, after the energy and excitement of Nuremberg, NY was a bit of a downer -- a much smaller fair, though still huge. That being said, however, there were many worthwhile things to see. We continue to add 'big-name' lines to our store, and this year those new brands will include Steiff, Playmobil and others, so we reviewed those lines with eager eyes.

After NY, we are reconvened in Vienna for three days in that most civilized city. We happened to be there over the night of the grand Ball at the Vienna Opera House, so we had the fun of watching all of the grand dames arriving in their ball gown finery accompanied by their men in white ties and tails. Paris Hilton was invited that night, too, but thankfully we had to leave before her arrival.

From Vienna, it was on to Munich, and then to Frankfurt for our return flight to Detroit. All told, it was a very worthwhile trip. We have several great leads on unique product lines, including a couple that are very promising for us to be the U.S. distributor. Look for them in the coming months (hopefully including the funny little fellow pictured above)!

So, if you are looking for tips on places to stay in Frankfurt, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Trnava, Nuremberg, or surrounding environs, let us know! And we can now confidently say that international travel can be done with small children! We had heard from friends that it would be no problem, but had to experience it for ourselves. Hopefully this was the first of many such trips. Thanks for your interest and for following our progress.

To points east

The Toy Fair has ended and we are now in Slovakia, where we used to live, recruiting summer employees. Though it was our first Nuremberg Fair, and we had no real standard by which to judge it, apart from our experiences at the New York Toy Fair, we would call it a success. We discovered many, many lines of toys that we plan to import directly, and several that we may consider distributing if we can reach an agreement with the manufacturers.

In the end, we walked almost the entire show twice (excepting the remote control and model train halls) and thankfully, we saw a lot the second time that we didn't see in the first round! We hope to make this an annual event, perhaps even combining it with the Paris Gift Show in late January (for a nice peek at the Paris show, check out the Modern Tots blog).

Departing from our weeklong home in Zirndorf, we hopped the train for Munich, then on to Salzburg, where we spent the night (and Ryan spent the evening lolling about the hotel room with a fever). Then 2 dear friends picked us up in Bratislava and we are now in Trnava for the week. Unfortunately, Sarah now has caught the "German Grippe" and is in no fine state. Hopefully the children will escape it!


Tomorrow Ryan is off to NY for the Toy Fair there, while the rest of the group will catch up with old friends and find new employees here in Trnava. You might catch a glimpse of our kids feeding bread to pigeons in the town square on the Trnava web cam aimed at the heart of the old town (use the username and password listed at the top of the cam page).

Dovidenia!

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.