Toy cataloger Grandparent’s Toy Connection has a new name, Toyclassics.com, and new owners. Three former employees of now-defunct multititle mailer Rivertown Trading Co. — Teresa Jackson, Kyle Jackson, and Kim McGraw-Luke — bought the company from founder Linda Rosenthal in June and relocated it from Stamford, CT, to Stillwater, MN.
The new owners have already revamped its creative, merchandising strategy, and back-end operations. “We felt that our fields of expertise could make immediate changes to the places where the business was not performing well,” says co-owner Teresa Jackson, who with McGraw-Luke also owns The Emerge Group, which helps companies find operations vendors.
For one thing, Grandparent’s Toy Connection had used a third-party call center but handled fulfillment inhouse, resulting in what Jackson says were onerous overhead costs. The catalog now uses Cincinnati-based FillTek Fulfillment Technologies for both call center and fulfillment services. Order-processing costs have gone down 30%, Jackson says, and outbound shipping costs have declined an estimated 15%-20%.
With the back end in better shape, the partners then focused on marketing and branding. The change in name is part of the company’s attempt to reach out to a broader audience. “We want to keep it geared toward classic toys — toys you know and remember, and toys that will become classics,” Jackson says. “We wanted to put the emphasis on classic toys rather than on appealing strictly to an older demographic.”
Sixty-five percent of the merchandise was replaced following the change in ownership. Toys that didn’t make the cut were those that were considered too low end, omnipresent, or “tired,” such as the SpongeBob SquarePants Sno-Cone Maker and the Madeline backpack. Among the approximately 250 SKUs currently carried are the $79.99 NFL Super Bowl Electric Football board game and the $125 Century Baseball, a miniature pinball-like game made out of wood, both toys that Jackson calls “nostalgic favorites.” There is a better mix of product now, she says, and price points are “incrementally higher,” though she won’t divulge specifics.
The redesigned catalog features fewer items per page: six or seven compared with up to a dozen before. The grid format of the old design has been loosened as well — the product shots are no longer all the same size, Jackson notes. “It’s somewhat sympathetic to the old design, so it can be recognized, but also very different, fresh, and easier to read,” she says. The Website has also been redesigned, with a more colorful look and an improved search function that allows customers to search by categories such as “grandparent,” “old friends,” “pretend play,” and “active play.”
The first mailing under new ownership was the initial holiday drop in September, which went to an undisclosed number of house file and rented names. While Rosenthal had invested in prospecting, Jackson says, the new owners are doing “significantly more.” Two more mailings were planned for the fall/holiday season, but the new owners have not yet decided on a permanent mailing plan.