Trade fair chat

It’s the biggest get-together in the toy industry: the 2011 Nuremberg Toy Fair was attended by some 79,000 people in the toy trade, 54 per cent of them from outside Germany. And in the midst of it all was the Simba Dickie Group, with no fewer than six exhibition stands.

On the main stand Majorette, a French subsidiary of the Simba Dickie Group, had devoted itself to the motto of this year’s Toy Fair, ‘Toys go green’. The garage in their Echo Tech City generates its own power, using dynamos to work the lights in the toy cars, the car-wash facilities and the lift.

Other Simba Dickie Group brands also had new ideas to show, such as Dickie Toys’ Red Bull RC cars, and BIG’s BIG-HARRY and BIG-GARRY ride-ons. Just as important: licensed themes, including Kikaninchen, the popular TV rabbit, and Cars. And this was the first appearance of the Heros brand. The Simba Dickie Group took over this wooden toy manufacturer as recently as last autumn: now the wooden building bricks made their way from the forests of Bavaria to the Simba Dickie Group stand.

Smoby, France’s biggest toy manufacturer, had its own stand to show off its products, as did Schuco and Carson. Toymakers Zoch and Noris invited visitors into a world of their own. Not forgetting Schipper, the paint-by-numbers specialist from Nuremberg. Schipper’s very own art exhibition showed what wonderful works can be achieved using this technique, featuring world-famous painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh.