28. December 2010
Fürth's Top Model - the Steffi Love world is now housed in its own pavilion.
The toy industry lives like the fashion industry – always at least one season in advance. Hence retailers visiting this year’s spring show by Simba Dickie Vertriebs GmbH (SDV) were mostly doing their Christmas shopping. But some were looking for a few last-minute articles for summer, or some of the current best-sellers. For a fortnight, new and established customers do the rounds of the gigantic exhibition hall. Some brisk and focused, others leisurely, curious about everything. Many go
alone, but some like to be accompanied by employees who will show them
everything. And we look over their shoulders.
Eighteen months ago, Karl Yabroudi undertook to prepare this particular sales path. Retailers ought to profi t signifi cantly from this focus on their trade, and at the same time it should strengthen the Simba Dickie Group brands. A clever idea, but would it work? "We are very pleased," says Karl Yabroudi, sales manager for retail and association sales.
"New customers are coming in almost every day. And," he adds with satisfaction,
"we reached our target turnover for the first year, even though it was pretty
ambitious." The retail concept is fl ourishing. "At the 2010 Toy Fair, 430 new customers visited our stand." But at the Nuremberg Toy Fair not all the 4,000 products can be exhibited for one thing, and for another, visitors don’t have enough time to examine it all at their leisure. That’s why the in-house mini-fair is so popular. "To begin with, about 50 retailers took the opportunity to visit our special show. Now we already have 130," confirms Karl Yabroudi, to the great satisfaction of him and his twelve-man team.
A good idea pays off
Enticement: Sara Marrano (left) and Heike Weigand present the "Bonbon" offers.
A good idea pays off Next to the performance-related discounts and specials, the main draws are the exclusive products and the "Bonbon"
products. You can only get these at the
retail fair and they are only for customers
who make the extra journey. If you don’t
come along, you don’t get them. "These are genuine highlights, not end-of-lines,"
stresses the SDV director. "So that our retailers can stand out in the market."
This time, for example, the goodies include Majorette playsets, BIG Bobby Cars with whisper-quiet tires or shoesavers included, an exclusive Dickie crane, and a novelty, the Baby Filly, a tiny horse in a pink carrying case which draws store owners straightaway like a magnet.
Targeted search and find
First-time visitors find the showroom a jaw-dropping experience, but even long-term customers tend to gape in astonishment at the new pavilion that is now Steffi Love’s home. "We don’t just want to be competent partners to the retail trade and exclusive manufacturers, we are also trend-setters," is how Karl Yabroudi describes his objective. "We try to take the torture out of choice, concentrating on the highlights and top sellers."
Novelties are the biggest draw
This year they include, for example, Dickie Toys’ H2O cars, which puff out authentic steam when you run them around. An absolute highlight is the Smoby Loft kitchen: (Plastic) fl ames sizzle in the gas oven and the ceramic cooker top really glows. Employees in the SDV sales department explain the exceptional play potential to interested customers. Interested customers such as the firm Spielwaren Ahlers.
Inspired retailer
Margit and Holger Ahlers, from Eichstätt, spend an entire working day going from
product to product. "I know exactly what I want, but I’m very happy to let myself
be inspired by something," says Margit Ahlers. In February she placed her fi rst
orders at the toy fair, and this is her second visit to Fürth. Husband and wife
are accompanied and advised by sales representative Ralph Gottwald.
Their 200-square-meter store offers a full range of toys, up to 7,000 different
products. There’s a great demand for model cars and buses. Not so much from
children, rather from adults, who give them away with travel vouchers. Baby
toys, paint-by-numbers, and board games also sell well. It’s convenient for them
that the games fi rm Zoch now belongs to the Simba Dickie Group: "We now have
the games as a permanent part of our program." Margit Ahlers used to order
everything from a wholesaler. She finds it very much to her taste to be able to see
and handle everything. "Just ordering from catalogs – that’s not for me." She
says she is choosy about her selection: "I only want attractive things of high
quality." She epitomizes the priorities of the specialist retailer: to use her advisory
competence as a way of standing out from the self-service stores.But when it
comes to the Fillies, she’s happy to serve herself.
Independent buyer
Ingo Meyer-Blendig is another who finds the little collectible horses a highlight of
his visit. As buyer for the 150-year-old traditional fi rm A. W. Schütte GmbH &
Co. KG, based in Gifhorn where its sales area covers 1,400 square meters, he has
traveled from north to south Germany along with his colleague Denise Boenke
so as to spend a few hours working through the order lists he has ready on his
laptop. "We know our way around here already," says the visitor from Lower
Saxony, who has been a Simba Dickie Group customer for six years and knows
exactly what he wants today: "The kids pounce on anything that’s advertised on
TV, Evi Love is selling very well for us." And he immediately orders some big
boxfuls of Fillies: "I’m really short on those!"
Awestruck first-time visitors
Awestruck: Cloppenburg buyers Gabriele Kamplus (front) and Jennifer Damer,of Toys Place for Kids, with Richard Siegmann.
Also from north Germany are buyers
Gabriele Kamplus and Jennifer Damer,
of Toys Place for Kids, based in Cloppenburg. Their 600-square-meter store focuses on toys for girls. This explains why they linger in the Steffi Love area and around all Hello Kitty articles. "We’re doing some serious buying today,"
laughs Gabriele Kamplus as an employee shows her the new Steffi Love camper.
Sales representative Richard Siegmann hovers close to his visitors. He is already
travelling around with a modern scanner for recording orders. All customer advisors will soon have such a device. Because leafing through the 50-page price list is quite a job. By scanning in a barcode, a product can be entered straight on to the order list on the computer. Apart from that, it’s only necessary to specify the quantity.
Both ladies are spontaneously enticed into buying. "This showroom is breathtaking," says Jennifer Damer, who is visiting for the fi rst time along with her
colleague. They enjoy the personal contact and the fact that Richard Siegmann
has done some pre-sorting for them. Trawling through the whole catalog is all
but impossible. "We just want to handle everything we buy, it’s quality that counts." And the quality is convincing, as is shown by their order list at the end of the day.
Convinced long-term visitor
Christiane Barth really spends a lot of time in Fürth in April. As director of David
Faix & Söhne GmbH, she comes three times to the retail shows, each time with
various groups of employees from her subsidiaries in Darmstadt, Frankfurt am
Main, Sulzbach, and Weiterstadt, which range from 370 to 800 square meters.
The full range includes some 22,000–28,000 products, looked after by about
50 employees. For the last three years she has been ordering Simba Dickie Group
toys directly in Fürth, particularly BIG and Noris toys. "This time I’ve found something in all the brands, especially the Smoby license themes," says this loyal customer. She fi nds it extremely good to have one ongoing contact in the form of SDV. "Doing everything with one phone call saves me a lot of time and expense."
Classic toy specialist
This is also valued by Waltraud Seigert, of Spiel & Freizeit Seigert, based in Freilassing. She has been a customer ever since the Simba Dickie Group came into being. "We started in 1993 with Dickie Tamiya, now it’s the full program," says
this executive with nearly 1,600 square meters of sales space at her disposal.
"The Fillies are fantastic. Other people offer little horses and collectibles, but
only Simba Toys Fillies are worthwhile, it’s a top-class article, our bread and
butter," says Waltraud Seigert. Hence this spring she is delighted by "the Filly
accessories."
This time she has devoted most of her four-hour visit to novelties. "I already know the range, but the Bonbon range is worth the journey." Seigert’s fi rm specializes in classic toys, "puppets, toy shops, that’s what I love best." Because Waltraud Seigert herself attaches great importance to giving her customers personal advice, "I value the close contact with the Simba Dickie Group."
Satisfied business partner
Good relations: Michael Sieber, CEO of the Simba Dickie Group, gives a warm welcome to Sigrid Fuhr from Giessen.
Sigrid Fuhr has had signifi cantly less
office work since the appearance of Simba Dickie Vertriebs GmbH: "All brands at the same supplier address, just one bill, that cuts down the workload," concludes the owner of J. H. Fuhr Spiel-Freizeit-Hobby, based in Giessen. She is the fifth generation of the fi rm’s directors, employs 50 people, and has 1,700 square meters of sales space housing 54,000 articles. They include about 850 toys by Smoby, BIG, Schipper Arts&Crafts, and Eichhorn. The "buying fairs" are a permanent feature of her engagements diary. She inspects everything: "Touching is important for me, especially with regard to wood. No catalog can provide that."
Sigrid Fuhr travels with her mother. They have been selling Simba Dickie products since the mid-1990s. She spends a whole day inspecting the exhibition of baby and toddler toys, dolls, Smoby, BIG, Schipper Arts&Crafts, Noris, Zoch. Another
employee is looking at Dickie, Schuco, and Tamiya: "That’s not my specialty."
The special advantage of the Fürth firm: "Everything is clearly regulated, a clean,
transparent business". Sigrid Fuhr is full of praise. "When you get a lot of extras,
lots of different discounts, opaque special terms and conditions, you lose the big
picture." And "Despite the size of the fi rm it has remained on a human scale,"
she says. The contact is still personal, almost like family. And the exclusive ranges on offer to retailers "are worth it." Still more decisive: "I’d like some products that you can’t get from discount stores." And the likelihood is, she’ll get them here.
A successful team: Karl Yabroudi (fourth from right) with employees of the Simba Dickie Vertriebsgesellschaft (from l.): Heinz Brenczek, Ralph Gottwald, Dittger Krabel, Frank Müller, Heike Weigand, Richard Siegmann, Olga Becker, Sonja Truckenmüller, Kathrin Hornung, Daniela Lamprecht, Tanja Schmidt, Sara Marrano.
