Evil toilets, terror food and billionaire Squishmallows: my eye-popping day at the UK's giant toy fair

The Guardian

30-01-2025

A chubby baby dinosaur waddles down a pink carpeted aisle, narrowly avoiding an army of Care Bears tramping in the other direction. Nearby, a sales rep shows off a collection of insect-breeding habitats, just as Pikachu scampers around the corner, bumping into her neat display. Across the hall, inventors show off their fiendish new board games, magicians demonstrate glowing plastic thumbs, while others grapple with instructions by a table covered with thousands of tiny plastic bricks.
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Welcome to the Toy Fair, in London's Kensington Olympia, the UK's biggest bonanza of toys, games and hobbies, where the world's manufacturers converge to pedal their latest wares, as retailers scour the endless stands for the hottest new trends. It's a mind-boggling place of plushies and puzzles, remote-control cars and mud kitchens, and more plastic than you would find at a petrochemical convention. Here, the £3.4bn business of fun is taken very seriously indeed, with NDAs galore and not a child in sight. So where is the toy world heading in 2025?
'We're seeing a real boom in micro collectibles,' says Kerri Atherton, head of public affairs at the British Toy & Hobby Association, which organises the fair, now in its 71st year. 'They have all of the cuteness without the big price tag, and they're also popular with adults, who like to display them rather than play with them.'
Browsing the 250 stands feels like hopping between Lilliput and Brobdingnag. On the one hand, you encounter super-sized toy characters at every turn: Fireman Sam gives a cheery beam, a permanent smile frozen on his fuzzy felt face; a cyclopian red Numberblock is told by its minder to wave nicely. But the toys themselves, which are seductively arranged on the stands like jars in a sweetshop window, are getting smaller and smaller, as manufacturers capitalise on the current trend for teeny collectibles. It's a symptom of both customers' reduced spending power and their lack of storage space, along with the ever-growing lust for all things kawaii.
'People just love the fact they're so bitty,' says Jeff van Rens from Funko, a US brand that makes phenomenally popular vinyl figurines called Pops, with cartoonishly square, oversized heads. He ushers me into their booth where, along with shelves groaning with their staple cast of 10cm-tall plastic characters, themed around everything from Star Wars to Stranger Things, there are racks of Bitty Pops – miniature versions of the same characters, standing just over 2cm high. Barely big enough to have facial features beyond two giant doe eyes, they look very easy to lose down the back of the sofa.
'In today's world, space can often be a consideration with collecting,' says Van Rens. 'You could have two Funko Pops, or the entire collection of DC Bitty Pops, taking up about the same amount of space.' He gestures to a shelf where an itty-bitty Batman stands next to an equally diminutive Joker, each sealed in a tiny acrylic box. They are sold in packs of four for £10 (compared with a single Pop for around £13), and there's a clever marketing ruse: one of the four is a mystery character, opening up a lucrative realm of duplicates.
Graduated levels of rarity mean that devoted 'Funko completists' are spurred on to buy evermore packs in the hope of completing the set. It's hard not to wince at the sheer amount of PVC on display – one of the most toxic plastics to produce and dispose of – especially after Funko was accused of throwing $30m of excess stock in landfill (a practice not uncommon in the toy industry). But fear not, its range includes a Captain Planet figurine, 'to repair the damage done to the Earth!'
The blind box trend, as buying surprise toys in opaque packaging is known, has exploded in recent years, with a global market value of around £11bn. Stores such as Pop Mart and Miniso have boomed in popularity, particularly with the 'kidult' market – the over 12s, who now account for almost £1 in every £3 spent on toys. Crowds of teens and young adults can be found queueing for the latest blind box releases, while the stores are full of people holding the boxes up to their ears and shaking them, hoping to divine what's inside.
'The lucky dip element has always been a popular play pattern,' says Adam White, brand manager at Character Options, distributor of major toy brands such as Teletubbies, Doctor Who and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 'Just think of collecting football stickers.' But he says the lust for surprise has been supercharged in recent years by the surge of unboxing videos on social media, in which fans breathlessly open their mystery boxes to rapt audiences online.
He shows me one of their latest toy ranges, called Terror Fried. 'It's based on what happens when fast food goes wrong,' he says. 'Maybe a mouse or a cockroach falls into the deep fat fryer.' This year's collection, Stir-fry Surprise, will take the form of a mutant Chinese takeaway. He picks up a spring roll and crushes it in his hand, causing gelatinous slime to ooze between his fingers. There's a collectible creepy-crawly lurking in the slime, one of many mystery critters with different degrees of rarity, awaiting inside bowls of noodle soup, fortune cookies and sushi rolls.
'We delivered these to influencers in brown paper bags, just like a takeaway,' says White. 'Opening the mystery packages is very popular on YouTube and TikTok,' he adds, peer-to-peer marketing in the toy sector now being much more effective than conventional advertising. Indeed, the fair even has a dedicated 'child influencer day', the only time children are allowed into this adult-only funfair, as long as they have a performer's licence.
The influencers tend to flock to toys linked to popular TV programmes and films – this year Lilo & Stitch, Bluey, Sonic and Wicked are particular favourites – with licensed products bigger than ever, making up 35% of the total toy market. Sylvanian Families hopes to capitalise on its 40th anniversary year, with a movie coming out in April, while an unexpected hit has come from one of the stranger corners of the internet, in the form of Skibidi Toilet – a surreal animated YouTube series about possessed toilets going to war with besuited humanoid characters with TVs for heads. A Toilet Mystery Surprise can be yours for £49.99. ('6yr old grandson thought it was the best present,' says one review. 'I thought personally it was not great value for money.') As Atherton says: 'You just can't predict what kids are going to like.'
For all the novelty on show, the biggest overall takeaway of the fair is actually how simple the most popular toys continue to be. You might have expected the tech industry to have extended its tentacles deeper into the realm of play by now, with AI-powered chat bears spouting GPT-generated gobbledegook, but the overriding trend is back to basics. For the second year running, the bestselling toy in the UK was an £8 cushion with a face. The 20cm-high Squishmallow defies all expectations of innovation, being an egg-shaped stuffed toy with no discernible USP. But timing, in the toy world, is everything.
Touted as gen alpha's version of Beanie Babies, Squishmallows' ultra-soft, cushion-like quality profited from the global hunger for comforting hugs and cuddles in the pandemic, while their cosy popularity was further fuelled by endorsements on social media from celebrity devotees like Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga. The hype even prompted Warren Buffett to buy the company in 2022 – an event marked by the release of a plushie version of the billionaire investor.
The cute cushions take the form of animals vegetables, and strange hybrids of both, and each comes with its own little biography, encouraging fans to collect a whole cast of oddball characters they might identify with. Meet Malcolm, a football-mad mushroom, or Floyd, a pack of french fries who enjoys sailing. Jumping on the micro mystery bandwagon, the company recently launched FigBands, smaller versions of Squishmallows. Sold blind, they can be displayed, worn, or attached to bags, 'letting you flaunt your fandom wherever you go!'
Disrupting the Lego Group's longstanding primacy, Squishmallow's manufacturer, Jazwares, boasted the most prominent and highest security stand of the whole fair. It was surrounded by high walls, guarded by an army of reps, and viewable by appointment only, with visits subject to binding non-disclosure agreements. The lucrative future of cuddly cushions remains a closely guarded secret.