In the spotlight: Tiger Hobbies
Gary Ford explains how his diecast retail with hobby import business came about and grew into the success it is today, despite its fair share of challenges.
Gary Ford tells the story of his company's success.
Tiger Hobbies was formed in 2006 after a period trading as Gary’s Models. Prior to that I served 26 years in the Royal Air Force, in the supply trade, joining as a 16-year-old in 1976, leaving as a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer (SNCO) in 2002. I served at ten UK bases plus overseas service in Cyprus, Germany, Central America, Falklands, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and finally Alaska, at Eielson Air Force Base, with one of the largest RAF exercises of that period, Exercise Cope Thunder.
We started off as Gary’s Models in 2002, in a 150 sq ft unit, in an old school converted to council business units near Barnsley, where we sold preowned diecast models and plastic kits. It was at this time that there were major changes in our hobby trade, with a number of business folding or in trouble, leaving surplus stock to be had at good prices. Soon I was buying pallets of models, so much so that we had to move these on to other hobby traders, thus we started our wholesale side. In about 2004, we started to use my logistics experience to import plastic kits and some diecast, on a small scale, to keep the wholesale side going.
The council business units were very flexible, meaning that we were able upgrade to a larger unit at very short notice, so we found ourselves needing to do that almost by the month. In 2006, we were approached by a new company in Hong Kong who were looking for a UK Distributor. It had tried more established UK importers, but got no response, other than these are same type of models as Corgi and they will not compete.
Corgi, at the time owned by a US parent, was struggling and the company in Hong Kong was making the models for it. Shortly afterwards, Corgi’s parent company folded, leaving the brand out of the picture for a while, until it was taken over by its current owners, Hornby, who would then need time to get Corgi back into the swing of things.That, understandably, took quite a while.
Our new import agency was called Hobby Master, and its range of diecast aviation models was suddenly sucked into the vacuum left by the lack of Corgi models to sell. Now named Tiger Hobbies, we went from £150,000 turnover in 2005 to £1.2 million in a little over three years, mainly selling Hobby Master.This, on the face of it, seems great, but the banks would not lend a great deal of money, so we had to work on an extremely lean basis, and make sure we did not spend any money on anything that was not necessary, as each larger load soaked up the profit from previous smaller loads, sometimes leaving us with no money in the account until we were paid in 30 days.
SAVED BY THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRASH
In 2008, the global economy suffered the financial crash in the housing market, that rattled through the rest of the banking world.This did not really bite down hard until 2010, and Tiger Hobbies’ turnover soon fell by more than 50%, to less than £600,000. For most companies this would have been the end, but Tiger Hobbies was small and very agile, and coped by quickly cutting our cloth accordingly. Over a period of about three years, we lost many customers, including Modelzone and most of our museum customers. But this left a hardcore range of trade customers who worked hard to keep the Hobby Master range going. We found we were importing fewer products, with loads of no more than £30,000 per month, which did not deviate in quantity by much each month, but the profit stayed in the bank rather than being taken up by a larger load. So Tiger Hobbies found itself doing a lot less business, but having more money to play with, taking this time to plan for a broader future with other brands and not to expand our diecast portfolio, keeping just Hobby Master and Century Wings, and look at the opportunity in the world of plastic kits again.
Tiger Hobbies are now the UK Agents of 17 fantastic brands – diecast by Hobby Master and Century Wings, plastic kits by Rye Field, Gecko Models, NUNU,Very Fire, IBG, Pig Models, Zoukie Mura, Hobby 2000, ARMA Hobby,Valom, Horizon Models, Great Wall Hobby and Modelcollect.There are also action figures by Star Ace and plastic soldiers from Armies in Plastic.
Tiger Hobbies is now approaching the milestone of 500,000 Hobby Master models sold in the UK and Europe, and Hobby Master is now the world’s largest range of quality diecast aviation - and we are proud of the part we have played in that.Tiger Hobbies is still a dynamic, but as we used to say in the RAF, lean and mean company.We have built back up our turnover to about £1.5 million, despite all the problems that businesses have faced in the last few years, including Brexit (Tiger Hobbies has lost about 25% of its turnover again, as all but two of our European customers stopped trading with us due to the border problems and duties levied), but we have increased our number of UK trade customers to take up the lost turnover. Covid has affected everyone, but the recent international shipping crisis, which seems to have been totally overlooked by the UK Government, has tested our resolve more than anything else.We have seen rises of 300% in shipping charges from the Far East, plus the cancelling of all sailing from Hong Kong and China for most of April 2021.This will come to an end and we are looking forward to expanding the Tiger Hobbies presence within the hobby trade once more.