Having overcome three difficult years within the toy retail trade and the spectre of collapse, we have managed as a team at Little Wonders to create a positive outlook for the future.

Our shop floor sales have doubled over night, and we have found new slightly larger premises only 150 yards away at 75 per cent less rent. In addition we have received a tidal wave of genuine support and advice from family run companies, both huge and small, nation wide. 

This has re-invigorated our lapsed belief in all of the socially responsible aspects of our trade that first inspired us to work within it. Genuine and nice people have made themselves known to us offering help wherever they can, and things are most definitely looking up.  We have an exciting new business plan based upon what we now understand to be a real cultural shift within our trade demanded by our customers, if not in society as a whole, that promises rewarding growth to all those whom we are inviting to embrace it.

“How on earth have we managed to do this?” you might ask.  Simple, we’ve started to be honest again. I made the decision when I set up my own business five years ago to be honest about our trade. So why did our customers past and present rally to our plight when our future was threatened?

Well we’ve been told bluntly that our customers are fed up being “maximised” - milked for short term profit by faceless unaccountable bargain basement stores glossily pretending to be something they are not - always chasing the cheaper, disposable, and dumbed down option.

Our customers don’t see themselves as cheap, disposable and dumb and they are beginning to get very angry about it.

Maybe the leisure activity of wandering high streets and shopping centres, enjoying self-prescribed retail therapy while causing price wars to destroy the vibrancy and choice on our high streets, has lost its kick.

Could it be that something like a transparent retail company which actually gives a damn about those who enjoy the products we sell - the children - is the way forward? Are people truly waking up to what we need, as opposed to what we want?  I wish to open interactive retail toy outlets selling good wholesome ethical toys alongside exceptional advice for parents looking to define themselves in times of personal growth and the wellbeing of their child.

Time and time again suppliers who have visited any one of our past and present existing stores have instantly expressed surprise at our small size compared to the large volume of stock that we order from them.  We’re always friendly with neighbouring outlets selling complementary ranges to ours, and through our trusting relationships built up with a select number of suppliers, we know that our sales per square foot are anything up to four times greater than those around us, small independent or (especially) global giant.

Even the recession only affected our turnover marginally, we already were a stripped back efficient and responsible operation. 

So what has slowed us down, taking us to the brink of extinction? Well there have been two dark molesting forces at work - landlords and suppliers.  Huge faceless corporate landlords, often pension companies such as the Royal Mail’s pension scheme, which has recently bought a shopping centre close to my shop in St Albans.  These companies are from within a trade that has recklessly mismanaged billions of pounds and is now panicking on a ledge on the thirteenth floor. 

They are desperate to claw back short term profits and are hiking up the rents of each and every retail unit they purchase.  The maths is simple, if you would like an extra £5,000 per year in your pension then be prepared to pay an extra £5,000 each year on your shopping.  But that won’t quite happen as all of the supermarkets own their own land of course so the high street will just become even more uncompetitive and empty of footfall as only empty opticians, mobile phone shops, building societies and bookies will be able to afford the unrealistic rents to trade from here.

I have a reputation for speaking my mind over any injustices carried out against my company,  yet still I believe that I am amongst the minority in this trade in wanting to go about my business in a nice and honourable fashion, I feel that I have been naive.

I often provided advice to an established supplier with whom we had been a customer for about seven years.  Having acquired the UK distribution rights to a range of upmarket soft toys, they were openly in need of help in the selection and quantities of items within the range to hold within the UK.  With no experience whatsoever in dealing with this sort of collection they were eager to talk to me. 

My company had been importing the items both direct and through distributors to retail for years and even ran the  web site for the range.  Within a year of giving them all the information that they thought they needed via numerous telephone conversations and face to face meetings a few years later I receive a bill for court charges and legal costs over a miniscule outstanding invoice, truly a drop in the ocean of what we had happily paid over the years. 

It was in the form of a seven day warning letter sent at the beginning of a front page publicised seven day national postage strike and conveniently arrived after the requested response date.  No telephone call, no e-mail, and no usual well-worn channel of communication. 

Then I am completely stonewalled when I of course immediately phone up to find out what was actually going on. 

At first I thought this was ignorance, then old fashioned bullying. But as I have now been reliably informed that this same distributor has opened a high street retail arm in the same town which it distributes from, and a retail website, both with a company name almost identical to my own, I now see it simply as a calculated and vindictive attempt to put us out of business.  As well as the theft of our online sales, their range was always amongst the cheaper end of the range that we sell so their online presence seriously cheapens the name of Little Wonders.

If this seems an extreme case, is there really any difference between this and any other supplier or manufacturer selling direct to the public and undercutting the retailers who have supported them over the years? 

Am I naïve?  What I do know is that I have yet another knife wound in my back and I’m not far wrong when I mention dark forces of malicious intent within my ‘wholesome’ trade.

The laughable x1.8 mark-up within the toy trade shows that we are all mugs.  My father looked at me with disbelief when I first told him this figure.  His traditional little coffee bar enjoys a nice little x100 mark up you see.  With many an Ann Summers high street store happily sitting nearby to our toy shops enjoying their competition free x7 multiplication is it any wonder that times are not what they should be within our trade and rents are rocketing out of our reach? 

With each and every supplier continuing in their support of web sites run unsustainably from teenage bedrooms and the utility rooms of now trapped-in-the-house new mums and dads I see no change in our pathetic mark-up anytime soon.  Even pre-historic man is thought to have traded confidently with a x2, what does that say about what our suppliers think about us retailers?

I think that we are indeed all idiots and we should all be ashamed for being so pathetic in the weak willed way that we all just crawl home each night accepting our situation in British business life.  Idiots, unless we remain in this trade for other reasons of course. Maybe an ill-communicated honest belief in the benefits of what we are providing to our customers? Perhaps a moral integrity that gets ground down by the daily struggle for financial survival?

So where is the toy trade’s moral equivalent of The Body Shop, an organisation proactively driving change and shouting proudly of its ongoing struggle? Well we’re here, that’s what we’re now striving to become, refusing to keep our pretty little head down and fit into to the decrepitly repugnant status quo.

There are now ugly things to be said that will upset people, but the ugly truths are about abuse of varying degrees throughout each and every link of the chain and the people in question need to be offended.  This should all have been done long ago and the old guard are more than lucky to have enjoyed their pound of flesh.

So here we are, just a single tiny traditional toy shop, the spectre of a double dip recession looming on the world’s horizon, and finding it easier to wring blood from a stone than money from our bank,  and an emotionally strained relationship with many of our (always eventually paid) suppliers.

But to quote Mr Smith on arriving in Washington “you fight for the lost causes harder than for any others”. We’ve got the beginnings of our investment and have struck deals of exclusivity on designs of toys that we will now have an element of control over to best suit the direction that we now see our wonderful market moving in.

Landlords and suppliers have made more money from our shops than we ever have.  Our primary business activity as registered at companies house is not the retailing of wholesome traditional toys, it’s a rent paying company.

I have personally been responsible for the concept behind some of the best selling items in the traditional toy trade.  Sometimes this may just be a variant, but some items are now manufactured by companies pro-active in bringing about wholesale change in the ethics of the traditional toy trade – I’m just a sucker for good factory conditions.

I have lobbied and persuaded many suppliers to take up and supply us with strong selling ranges for the UK’s independent retail market.  There is of course the personal advantages of my business’s survival in my actions but all have been done in a manor that has financially rewarded those that I have talked to and I seriously believe has led to the trade becoming a morally better place to work.

I am then quite the Marilyn Monroe of the toy trade; many a man has found good direction and fresh ideas through talking to me but I must remain typecast and front of house.  The dolly on reception must not acquire any new professional status, income - nay ‘respect’ - from anyone.

I have, through experience, come to the unsavoury conclusion that an overriding factor in all of my setbacks is a latent sexism that permeates every fleck of sawdust within the traditional toy trade. Traditional by name and traditionally bigoted by nature. I know this is a big statement to make, but I believe that it is simply my lack of appropriate genitalia that has prevented myself  from rising to becoming the most successful MD of any toy company out there. 

I breathe confidence, entrepreneurial skills are in my blood and profits through socially responsible behaviour are my game.  I know my stuff and I can never understand the complete lack of shame of every sales rep that stands in front of me in their misguided suit, each with silver pen in hand whilst glancing at their oversized watch to work out how many more cows in that very same field they can fit in for their day of over-milking. 

That’s why we’re a centrally run house account for pretty much every range that we stock, people with no idea about sustainable retail should not be trying to embarrass themselves through a lack of product knowledge or the usual antiquated moral compass on my shop floor. 

There is a cultural shift coming – I think it’s already here.  There is going to be a large swath of the toy trade that find themselves on the wrong side of this and many other divides that are threatening to rip the trade assunder.

Exaggeration? Well, the UK government now regularly debates television advertising of children’s toys.  One has to ask what else gets that sort of consideration in our upper houses apart from cigarettes, alcohol and junk food?  Outside of our insular trade there are some serious rumblings of discontent about how we are collectively going about our business, and nobody within the trade seems to have even the ability to talk about it. 

We all need to be talking about the difference between truly stimulating toys that are embraced through developmental social play with family members and carers - positive toys that we can all embrace - and then those that are the toy equivalent of junk food. 

Like a chocolate treat, there is nothing wrong in occasionally giving a child a short-lived junk-toy that encourages the child towards non-social isolated and insular play so that we can finally grab that 15 minutes to get the dinner ready.  But no responsible parent or carer should be making every meal for that child out of only cheap chocolate and crisps.  It would hamper the poor child’s development and quite literally kill the kid in the long term. 

Toys are a tool in the important cognitive, social and behavioural development of a child and thus our societies future generations, and then our very society itself.  We must consider our child’s toy collection just as importantly as our children’s nutritional diet, and we shouldn’t be feeding them shit.