5 Christmas toy crazes of years past, and how to predict this year’s winner

Every year, for as long as I can remember, there has been a runaway favourite in the Christmas must-have toy stakes. And in some years past, you’ll have found me desperately scrambling to try and find somewhere which still has any stock left. So this year we thought we’d put our combine skills in this field to good use and predict Christmas 2020’s number one toy. Before we reveal the results however, here are our top 5 surprise sell outs from years past.

5 The Beanie Baby 1995

A hit in the 90s Beanie Babies were a collection of stuffed animals created by Ty Warner Inc. They were so popular in 1995 that the a hotline was set up to help anxious parents find out when the next batch of the most popular Beanie Babies would be available in the shops. An original Princess Diana bear was sold on ebay for £62,500 back in 2015.

4 The Tamagochi

The Tamagotchi was a handheld device secured to your keyring that was supposed to be the digital equivalent of a pet. This was 98 so the technology doesn’t quite match up to some of the digital pets to be found today.

The idea was to raise the creature like you would a real pet, from the time it hatched until it become a full grown adult, by giving it food and love and playing with it regularly. So many kids in the 90s became fanatical about them that many schools banned them in class. They made a surprise come back in 2017

3. Hatchimals

A fury, egg bound version of the Tamagochi, Hatchimals topped the list as the most popular Christmas toy in 2016 with most shops running out in the lead up to Christmas. small robotic interactive bird would start out in an egg, before it hatched and started learning and developing skills the more you interacted with it. Prices were sometimes as high as three times the retail value - and it was in to February before most shops had managed to restock them.

2. Furby

1998, saw the Furby become the top selling Christmas toy with over 40 million sold in its initial launch. The weird cross between gremlin and an owl spoke its own language called 'Furbish' and would gradually use English words over time, simulating the process of learning English. The doll began to sell out over the festive period and was going for many times the original price as it got close to Christmas.

1.Elsa doll

The popular Disney film, Frozen, came out in 2013 and became incredibly popular.

Unsurprisingly during Christmas 2014, one of the hit toys was, of course, an Elsa doll, which sang and lit up (much to the joy of parents like me).

In the lead up to Christmas, parents scrambled to get the must-have item with many paying well over the retail value in order to secure one for their child.

And our prediction for 2020 is ….

Okay we have no idea.  We specialise in helping clients understand what their customers are doing online through the data their interactions generate and we can use this data to help predict and plan how to best engage with those customers in the future.

But guessing the outcome of a billion playground conversations and arguments, the whims of 8 year olds and the sudden obsessions of 6 year olds. No thanks! In our own bitter experience even Amazon, the undisputed masters of sales predictions and trend analysis still haven’t quite got to grips with this phenomenon

So sorry, we’re going to stick to what we’re good at; analysing what your customers, prospects and competitors are up to today and how to build a better digital strategy for the future which is base on evidence and not whims!