The Toys R Us parent company is partnering with the creators of the Candytopia pop-ups to create The ... [+]
Toys R Us has revealed its next move in its game plan to reinvent itself - interactive, pop-up play spaces called The Toys R Us Adventure.
As it did in July, when it announced a previous partnership to open interactive retail stores, Toys R Us is again betting experiences hold the key to its future.
Tru Kids Brands, the parent company that owns the Toys R Us brand following the retail chain’s bankruptcy and liquidation, said today that it has formed a new partnership with the team behind the Candytopia pop-up experiences that have drawn crowds in New York, Atlanta, Dallas and other cities.
The first two Toys R Us Adventure pop-ups created by Candytopia are scheduled to open in Chicago and Atlanta in mid-October. They will operate through the holiday season and then move on to other cities.
The play spaces won’t be stores – although each location will have a small gift shop – but toy manufacturers will have sponsorship opportunities to showcase their products. Parents and kids will be charged admission - $28 for adults, $20 for children 4-12 – to enter.
This is the second joint venture entered into by Tru Kids as it works to resurrect Toys R Us as a presence in this country. In July it announced a joint venture with retail tech firm b8ta to open two interactive and immersive Toys R Us stores in malls in Paramus, N.J., and Houston.
Those stores are scheduled to open in mid-to-late November.
BLOOMINGTON, MN - MARCH 05: A guest dives into a marshmallow themed foam pit inside the Candytopia ... [+]
While the Candytopia installations feature works of art made out of gumdrops and gummy bears, and a “marshmallow pool” (picture a ball pit, but filled instead with foam marshmallows), the Toys R Us Adventure spaces will include experiences sponsored by toy manufacturers, with giant versions of popular toys.
The Paw Patrol toy brand by Spin Master, specialty toy maker Melissa and Doug, and Schleich, which makes animal figurines and playsets, are some of the products and vendors that will be featured in the play spaces.
The play spaces will be “a mixture of play experiences and brand experiences,” said Tru Kids CEO Richard Barry, in a phone interview. “We’re going to have an environment where kids will really be able to experience being in a full Paw Patrol world,” he said.
In the Schleich room, visitors will be able to interact with giant Schleich figures, in an environment “where you’ll feel like you’re in a real jungle,” Barry said.
He said the Adventure spaces, as well as the retail stores, will fill a void created by the demise of the Toys R Us stores. “Toys R Us was a place to engage with brands in a way that they weren’t able to do so at other retail locations,” he said.
The Chicago location will occupy multiple floors of a building on Michigan Avenue, and one of the floors will have an 8,500 square foot ball pool filled with 1.5 million balls. “That’s seven 40-foot container truckloads of balls to fill that ball pit,” Barry said.
John Goodman, CEO of Candytopia, said the Adventure spaces will be like “a mini theme park where you’re having fun with your family, grandparents, parents, kids.” Each of the more than a dozen rooms in the locations will have five or six play areas, and it will take an hour to 75 minutes to experience all of them.
The Atlanta location, at Edens’ Lenox Marketplace mall, will be 14,000 square feet, and the Chicago location, at 830 N. Michigan Avenue, will be 36,000 square feet.
While the Candytopia pop-ups emphasize experiences over retail, their gift shops still sell a lot, Goodman said. The gift shops inside Candytopias do over $2,000 in sales per square foot, in a footprint of 800 to 1,500 square foot. “So we’re blending retail with the whole experience,” he said.
An artist's rendering of the new concept retail stores Toys R Us plans to open in partnership with ... [+]
The Toys R Us Adventure gift shops will sell souvenirs and Toys R Us branded products like water bottles or sweatshirts, but will also carry toys by the vendor partners.
“Kids that go through the experience are clearly going to want to go away with a toy in their hand,” Barry said.
Chris Byrne, a veteran toy expert and consultant known as The Toy Guy, calls the latest venture by Toys R Us a smart move.
“If their model isn’t about doing direct sales to consumers anymore, then they have to look for other ways to make money, and experiences are a great way to do that,” Byrne said.
James Zahn, senior editor of The Toy Insider, The Toy Book, and other toy trade publications, said he believes parents will pay to bring their children to the Toys R Us Adventure. Experiences and toy events have become so prevalent that Zahn devoted a special feature on them in the next issue of The Toy Book. “There’s Nickelodeon’s Slime City, there’s a Dr. Seuss experience” and in Pennsylvania there is the Crayola experience, he said. “My kids love going on experiences,” he said.
Back in its heyday, going to a Toys R Us store was an experience, even without any modern interactive experiences. Kids would be happy to wonder around the huge stores for an hour or more because the stores had more toys in one place than anywhere else in their worlds.
Parents typically would let the kids pick out one toy after a Saturday morning or school day afternoon spent browsing the aisles, often setting a spending price limit of $5, $10 or $20. For those parents, the price of the toy was worth the store experience. Now Toys R Us will learn if parents are willing to pay for its new experiences.
