Do Kids Still Want Toys?

Yes, but you need to remember what they like do with them.

Published: February, 2006

I braved the New York City blizzard and headed over to the Javits Center to speak on a panel at Toy Fair ‘06. The twenty inches of snow that fell were nothing compared with the challenges befalling the toy industry this year.

In 2005 many toy stores shut their doors. Profits were down. The only really robust segment of the market was toys for the preschool crowd with a slight nod to outdoor sports toys.

The holiday toy wish list for most kids was not for your traditional toy. Instead, it was for what Claire Green of The Parents Choice Foundation calls “the mini-mes” — ( kids who want what their parents have). And this year mini-me was spelled with an “i” as in pod or an “x” as in “box”?)

The irony is that good old kids toys have never been so much fun, so plentiful nor so cool. Nor, have they ever been so filled with so much technology or so expensive! According to one report 75% of the toys being displayed at the show are using some form of chip.

Despite the high tech and changes to and the industry strife, the thing that strikes me is that kids still like playing the same sorts of things kids have always liked —- dolls, spying, crafts and community. The trick is to keep the magic in the toy even after added the chips to the recipe. Here are some examples:

Let’s Get Physical

Maybe you remember reaching for the stars with Romper Room? Or watched kids shaking it up with the Sesame Street Gang? Now, Hasbro’s ION puts the kids in the picture. The $99 console has a built in video camera. The child sees themselves moving around with their favorite TV characters.

Natural Born Spies

Much of my youth revolved around decoder rings and erasable ink. No surprise that a large portion of Wild Planet’s imaginative toys are all about spying. My favorite of the day were the sunglasses with the built in camera for $30, but the radio controlled car with the built in video camera was a close second.

The Nurturers

OK, sometimes I cut their hair off and drew whiskers on their cheeks, and they spent lots of time in the buff, but I loved my dolls. I’m not altogether sure how much I love Amazing Amanda, but I do love her technology. She has a bigger vocabulary than my grown children (actually than a 2 year old) and she uses RFID tags in her clothes and accessories so that she does the appropriate things, like when she sees her potty for instance.

The Creators

Splicing Super 8 film with my Dad was not my idea of a good time, but I was always creating the next great backyard theatre production or keeping notes for what I knew would be my memoirs.

You could smell the beginnings user generated content on the Toy Show floor and some of the strongest odors came from Xow! The company already has a motion-capture animation package and their new Xipster FreeStyle™ movie-making platform provides clips of video, characters, props, music and photos that kids mix with their own drawings and photos to create personalized jibjab style animations.