The Evolving Toy Industry Presents Interesting Opportunities to Professionals Fr

Posted by Michael Graves on February 19th, 2020

The retail industry has changed greatly in recent years, and that created plenty of new challenges for manufacturers, wholesalers, and other suppliers. The toy industry, for instance, has had to evolve quickly to account for a great deal of rapid transformation of the retail business environment. Many of the most important toy jobs that are open today require highly developed skills of directly relevant kinds. Working with a toy recruiter who understands how the retail and toy industries have evolved will always make it easier to secure an appropriate job offer.

Toy Companies Increasingly Have to Excel at the National and International Levels

Independent toy stores with strong local presences used to be a lot more common than they are today. Small-scale retailers of many kinds have found it difficult to compete with national chains and internet-based giants like Amazon. As a result, toy manufacturers have had to become better equipped than many used to be to deal successfully with such large, influential retailers.

That has typically meant needing to hire professionals who are skilled at the types of negotiations and responses required in such situations. Instead of signing a contract with a single distributor who lines up deals with a number of wholesalers, toy manufacturers now more often work directly with large retailers. Because of this, many toy companies feature more account managers and even country-level sales directors than used to be the norm.

Fortunately, the skills required to negotiate with even an imposing retailer like Amazon or Walmart can generally be transferred quite successfully into the toy industry from elsewhere. As a result, many prominent toy industry account managers today are relatively recent arrivals with established records in other industries.

Like businesses of other kinds, toy companies care most about the results they realize in practice. Recruiting efforts that used to focus mostly on people with toy-specific experience are now more likely to include candidates from other industries.

Many Interesting Opportunities Await

Even if it was once seen as somewhat distinctive and even insular, the modern toy industry has opened up in some interesting and productive ways. Professionals looking to break into the business from other industries always do well to work with recruiters who are well-versed in how today's toy companies work.