Promotional activities of this year’s 618 online shopping festival are drawing to an end. Among consumer products, collectible toys or designer toys, well-known for the “healing effect”, are on consistent, high demand.
It’s worth noting that TOP TOY, a new designer toy brand, quickly offset the side-effects of the pandemic as its transaction volume exploded on the national stage: the brand’s sales revenue in Q1 saw a near-quadruple year-on-year growth, and its daily transaction volume on Dragon Boat festival and International Children's Day broke 10 million yuan. So, what is the underlying logic of its success?
To strengthen Omni-channel distribution to create an exceptionally grand occasion for consumption
This year, the pandemic, like a cold spell in later spring, came to look for trouble in many areas of China, causing commercial shutdowns and consumption downgrading as well as hitting the off-line stores of designer toy hard. Under the circumstance, TOP TOY has been pushing hard to optimize both online and off-line sales platforms by continuously reinforcing its Omni-channel distribution.
International Children’s Day, Dragon Boat festival, 618 online shopping festival… Entering this June, there are countless opportunities for designer toy brands to expose themselves in China’s “golden month for marketing”.
By leveraging this year’s International Children's Day as an exciting marketing opportunity, TOP TOY launched a “June 1st Collectible Toy Festival” to target children and adults alike.
A week before the 2022 International Children's Day, TOP TOY set up a hashtag, #toy design proposals for 100,000 RMB#, on Sina Weibo, and launched promotional activities in their off-line stores to involve fans and n0n-designer toy fanatics, in the product promotion process to closely associate with the branding activities. It was reported that the online promotion reached out to 600,000 people in Guangzhou alone.
At the same time, TOP TOY officially launched Hua series of mystery boxes, Yue Hua Entertainment’s first ever collectible designer toy figures of celebrity entertainers, arousing widespread discussion within entertainment industry and designer toy industry. Credit to the brand’s in-depth cooperation with Tmall, a documentary about Chinese building blocks, featuring TOP TOY founder and CEO Sun Yuanwen, appeared in the trending topics of Douyin and Sina Weibo.
Such promotional activities sent TOP TOY to the trendy topics six times within a single week where over 600 million online reads were recorded. On the evening of May 31, accomplished singer Su Xing was invited to make his appearance at TOP TOY Tmall’s living streaming studio, promoting more sales on “June 1st Collectible Toy Festival” by unlocking the live-streaming potential of showbiz celebrities.
During the “June 1st Collectible Toy Festival”, TOP TOY maximized the functionalities of its community marketing and membership system to incentivize the existing customers in the private domain by releasing “61-yuan coupon”, which became the driving force for millions of online users to burst in TOP TOY off-line stores to interact and consume.
With the growing online popularity, TOP TOY waited no time to organize off-line activities. It’s worth noting that, on the first day of “June 1st Collectible Toy Festival”, the Omni-channel daily turnover of TOP TOY broke 10 million yuan, a fantastic record.
On June 1st, the number of customers in TOP TOY’s PO PARK off-line store was twice more than expected as the shoppers responded incredibly well to the brand’s “Clear Everything Out” initiative: more than 600 products were shortlisted for the “39% off” deals with a minimum spending limit set at only 61 yuan. The bold promotion certainly paid off as fans queued over 12 hours to get in and the store recorded its highest sales volume since the opening in this April.
In addition, TOP TOY cooperated with Wuling Motors to bring a bonus for its fans who were eligible to enter a prize draw to purchase Wuling’s latest MINIEV GAMEBOY for half price. The innovative cross-boundary cooperation allowed TOP TOY to reach more consumers, even though they were not loyal designer toy collectors.
2022 marks the third year of regular nationwide epidemic prevention and control. Yet, it hardly makes any notable impact to the dazzling performance of TOP TOY. Under its Omni-channel development strategy combining both online and off-line sales methods, the TOP TOY brand, currently experiencing an explosive growth, has been constantly attracting new consumers and seeking for a more explosive customer growth.
To invite consumers to co-create content and improve the all-round consumption experience.
As a new designer toy brand, having a sizable off-line retail system is essential for TOP TOY’s long term development. As off-line customer flow often proves to be unstable, ambitious designer toy brands, whose off-line interactions with consumers are their bread and butter, are required to re-consider ways of maintaining the fanbase.
TOP TOY consistently implements an “off-line store + exhibits” strategy as the brand feels that every store is “a never ending exhibition”. Through continuous iteration of store style, emphasizing on customer interaction and setting up highly immersive scenes, the “self-pleasing” consumption concept of the new generation of shoppers is met while the TOP TOY brand maintains its originality.
This year, TOP TOY also made efforts to cooperate with E-sports, a popular cultural element amongst young people, which resonates with consumers of different ages and social classes.
Following the warm reception by the fans of designer toys and E-sports on Umasou！Mecha X EDG, a TOP TOY ART series product, EDG E-Sports Club’s X Dinosaur Girl was adapted as the primary visual effect in late May to convert TOP TOY’s designer toy dream factory store in COCO Park, Futian District of Shenzhen, into an E-sports-themed venue. Inside the store, the rich E-sports elements and gorgeous lighting effects would take any visitor to the E-sports dreamland.
Also, flash mobs and mini-exhibits were held to bring fans a diversified experience.
As an example, from March 25 to May 4, the first TOP TOY×VANKELY FanXperience in Shenzhen was held at Longcheng Wankeli, Longgang District. The FanXperience attracted influential original IPs such as BUZZ, TAMMY, TWINKLE and TOP TOY’s Fortune Cats, while immersive scenes including portals for star products and hand-painted graffiti walls were set up to establish a personalized field that allowed fans to experience the latest trends and provided instagrammable sites for trendsetters. The success of the FanXperience in Shenzhen certainly initiated a new upsurge of consumption on designer toys from local collectors.
// Content is the key factor for sales growth.
In an era of “content is the king”, it’s increasingly hard to please the consumers. A new consumer brand needs to create the best user experience to gain some reputation first in order to win the trust from consumers. This naturally leads to the brand’s online traffic growth which will attract more partners, so as to further drive the improvement of consumer experience.
In this circulation, brands make breakthroughs on product sales, and suppliers and partners also achieve high returns. Designer toy brands, facing fierce competition from its peers, certainly took inspirations from this beneficent cycle.
TOP TOY uses self-created online traffic as the cut-through point. Based on its original strategy of combining off-line stores and exhibits and added by leveraging a large scale of user-centric content that is replicable, TOP TOY has amplified its bandwidth through excellent user service and extensive consumption experience.
The successful delivery of mutual content creation usually requires a sound product first. TOP TOY’s products are able to reach private domains through effective traffic-driving in public domains and among its large fanbase. Then, fans are invited to purposefully co-create content associated with the brand, which will be sent back to public domains to form a closed-loop. This low-cost mutual content creation strategy gives birth to a large scale of content ecology. The sales volume of TOP TOY has certainly profited from consistent user recommendations being sent to online customers.
In an age of diversified business models, the strategy of focusing on the dual growth of content and user allows TOP TOY to keep getting inspirations from numerous interests, spirits and emotions of youth people to make its brand more cultured and accessible. The TOP TOY products have a way of effectively reach out the consumers from all angles and establish close relationships with them. The trick is simple: in the brand’s mutual content creation process, users have already “built” their products with their own personal labels attached. Hence, a profound brand memory has already been embedded in their brains.
To know consumers’ interest and connect it with the brand.
The consumption behavior of Generation Z, the main consumer base for designer toys, is driven by their interests, experiences and emotions. Youngsters, fond of personalized space and immersive shopping experience, love to spend, especially for their hobbies. Consumer brands, hoping to boost consumption, are investing heavily in understanding what young people are really into.
Nowadays, young people are the main force of regimen consumption. Top Toy saw the opportunity and cooperated with BYHEALTH to launch a collaborated edition of collectable toy - Night Cat of the Fortune Cat series. The dark-colored fortune cat implies that healthy nutritious energy supplier BYHEALTH and TOP TOY are jointly “safeguarding” the people who work so hard that they don’t even rest in late night. Night Cat becomes a hot hit as its spirit resonates with those who cannot escape from working late.
The underlying logic of TOP TOY lays to the understanding of customers, products and venues, which is an absolute advantage for the brand to grasp the interests of consumers. The decision makers are also patient enough when it comes to understanding the needs of the customers.
“We are regularly feeding the users’ voice back to our research & development team and purchasing team. In doing so, we are making products for our users, rather than overdrawing their bank accounts,” said Sun Yuanwen, founder and CEO of TOP TOY.
TOP TOY has been exploring multi-dimensional ways of creating products that connect with young people’s personal interests. One of the important steps that the brand has made is to prioritize building block as its NO.1 product, in a bid to create a concept of “Chinese building blocks”. In other words, building block is used as a trendy vehicle to tell Chinese stories and spread Chinese culture.
In September last year, TOP TOY cooperated with a number of Chinese brands to launch the first ever “Chinese Build Block Festival” in a building block market dominated by foreign brands. The Chinese alliance has more off-line stores and multiple channels to reach consumers - an advantage that its foreign competitors lack off. Showcasing the aesthetics of Chinese building blocks and creative power of Chinese designer toys at the Festival, TOP TOY received extensive attention from the building block industry and was included in 2022 CCFA China Franchise Best Practice Casebook.
This year, TOP TOY launched several originally designed Chinese-themed building block series, including the series of vintage, printmaking and urban cities, that are popular among the fans. On April 15, TOP TOY set up its first Chinese building block-themed Tmall flagship store. The brand also set up off-line Chinese building block-themed stores and special zones to consistently promote the popularization of Chinese building blocks.
Sun Wenyuan also pointed out: “Today’s consumers do not need affordable building blocks but the ones with brand value.” Looking ahead, TOP TOY will build a multi-dimensional production line of Chinese-themed building blocks that involves Chinese aerospace, Chinese style, fun collectable toys, urban streetscape, high-tech toy cars and green plants and flowers, so as to fully tap the commercial value of building blocks.
By keeping consistent with the general direction of “the product speaks for itself”, the Chinese designer toy market is expanding rapidly in recent years. TOP TOY’s on-going strategy of exploring the brand designs and incubating original IPs has paid off and shown strong growth potential.
In the first half of this year, TOP TOY developed beyond the old designs and released numerous exclusive products - a perfect fit for consumers pursuing newfangled IP products. During this February’s Spring Festival, TOP TOY’s Fortune Cat series, an originally designed IP product, climbed to the top selling list of all designer toys in Omni-channel distribution network - a breakthrough in sales for an original IP.
Around this year’s 618 online shopping festival, both TOP TOY exclusive products and co-branded products were launched. For instance, the series of Sanrio garage kits, Hua Hua World mystery boxes, the collectable TOP TOY Time Capsule, Clear Night in Mountains mystery boxes and Fortune Cat X Vegetable Dog collaborated special editions were highly appreciated by the consumers and performed remarkably well in sales.
The success is indivisible from the effective implementation of TOP TOY’s “Designer Toy Partner Plan”, which involves the signing of renowned artists, strengthening the cooperation with signed artists, promoting design talents within the team and many more. The more talents contributing creative ideas for TOP TOY, the more original products will be born to fit in the characteristics of different consumer groups and create a strong connection between the brand and the fans.
Furthermore, TOP TOY makes its off-line stores in first-tier and second-tier business circles available for its partners, including designers, designer toy studios and brand suppliers, to host IP signing sessions, product exhibits and other forms of promotional events for free. Not only did it create opportunities for brands to directly meet and communicate with the customers, the stores were given a valuable platform to shine.
As Generation Z is currently driving consumptive trends, any change of direction is a normality in retail industry. This year’s designer toy market is full of unknown variables; and designer toy brands ought to actively embrace new changes and new tricks.
TOP TOY maybe a young brand, yet it has no shortage of product, distribution and brand power. It has always responded well to the changes in the industry and the consumption market to maintain considerable online exposure, attract more customers and enhance brand value through a well-coordinated network of distribution channels, core products and sales methods.
