TOY BIZ SPY GAME
Trade show sellers now wall off wares from snoops
Espionage is taking all the fun out of the toy industry.
Corporate spying and counterfeiting have become such problems among makers of dolls, cars and unicorn poop that this year’s Toy Fair on Manhattan’s West Side felt more like a fortress than a playground.
The trade show, which ended Tuesday, was held in lots of walled-off toy booths guarded by vigilant staffers who made sure visitors were on their lists before being allowed to see the gadgets, action figures and games set to go on sale later this year.
“If our booth were open, it would be open hunting season,” said Richard Yanofsky, co-founder and president of WowWee, maker of the popular Fingerlings puppets.
WowWee started walling off its wares last year for the first time while Wicked Cool Toys, which owns Cabbage Patch Kids and makes Pokémon toys, closed off its booth this year for the first time.
“We’ll probably have more security at our booth next year,” co-president Michael Rinzler told The Post.
His staff stopped several competitors from entering the booth, including some who tried to slip in by flipping over their show badges to conceal their identities.
“There are a lot of frenemies in this business,” he said.
Toy executives say the secretive measures are increasingly necessary to keep the competition from stealing their ideas — and even their goods right off their Toy Fair displays.
Executives with stuffed animal maker Gund noticed that some of their display items had been outright pilfered, including four boxes of a tiny stuffed surprise.
More than a century old, Gund is increasingly having to defend its intellectual property because of the rise of online retailers and “unscrupu- lous” manufacturers, said Donald Lehnert, director of ecommerce and digital marketing. “We are the Cadillac of plush,” he told The Post.
The problem is so bad, toy giant MGA Entertainment once accused Mattel of sending spies to its booths at trade fairs. In a 2010 lawsuit, MGA alleged that Mattel staffers were instructed to print fake business cards at Kinkos to get its executives into rivals’ booths. Mattel denied the charges. Veterans of the annual show, which attracts some 1,200 toy companies, say this year’s event appeared to have the most closed booths ever.
“We were among the only closed booths about a decade ago,” said Lego spokesman Michael McNally. “But most of the larger brands have private booths now.”
They include toy giants Spin Master, MGA Entertainment, Mattel and Hasbro, as well as smaller toy companies.
Within the private booths, there can also be “secret rooms” where toy companies display their fledgling ideas, including costly one-of-a-kind prototypes. Only serious buyers, including reps from Target and Walmart, are allowed into those rooms, executives told The Post.
The Toy Association, which produces the show, disputed that there were more private booths this year, but declined to provide the numbers of open versus closed booths.
“We have been actively encouraging exhibitors to make more open and engaging booths,” a spokeswoman, Adrianne Appell, told The Post.