Steamforged Games’ Toby Davies on working towards a robust omni-channel approach for growth.
The traditional start to the year is looking significantly different in 2021, with none of the usual trade shows – including London’s Toy Fair, Nuremberg and Spring Fair – going ahead in-person.
So, what are licensees across a range of categories doing to fill the gap?
LicensingSource.net catches up with a selection to find out their plans and why it’s key for the industry to make the most of Q1 despite the calendar changes.
Today: Toby Davies, commercial director, Steamforged Games
“The lack of trade shows has meant having to work far more closely with all of our existing partners.
We took the decision to bring on key strategic distribution partners versus going direct to some larger retailers, to help the fact not having trade shows has made it a bit harder to pitch to these customers. The positives in doing so far outweighed the margin hit. You could say that in the year we had to stay 2m apart, we have never worked more closely.
While this was all going on, we doubled down on growing our core channels. Unfortunately, while we lost a fair number of trade customers in 2020, we finished the year well up on how many active customers were ordering from us regularly.
To support all of this we really had to start levelling up our digital marketing strategy, which will eventually give us a far more robust omni-channel approach and a healthy ecosystem across the channels you can find our products.”
This feature originally appeared in the spring 2021 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
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