Archive for the 'News & Views' Category
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
Are children’s toys and Christmas presents about to become more expensive ? Last week The Times carried an article suggesting that manufacturing costs in China were climbing as workers look for ever higher wages, and materials costs are rising too. It seems certain that those costs will be passed on to Western consumers, and here at Mulberry Bush we’ve already seen a number of proposed price increases from importers. Needless to say we’re negotiating hard to keep increases to a minimum, but imported toys are bound to cost more this Christmas.
One might think that it would be a good time for some of our UK toy manufacturing, lost over recent years, to come back to Britain. Sterling is comparatively weak, we have higher unemployment and a manufacturing industry that isn’t doing much at the moment. Yet I was intrigued to see this question from a toy industry member who asked in an online forum:
“Are you manufacturing toys or games in the UK? If so I’d love to hear from you with a view to forming a consortium to promote UK made toys and games”
That was back in January. As of June only one company has responded, and they are games manufacturers who still print their cardboard components here. Just one company !
Perhaps the reticence to manufacture is increased by the ever tougher legislation that surrounds toys, EU legislation that has slipped in largely unnoticed. New toy safety laws come into effect in the next few weeks, and these will only serve to reduce further the range of toys available whilst further increasing prices because of the high cost of compliance. It’s difficult to argue against it, because who would want to be responsible for injury to a child, or worse, resulting from an unsafe toy. I can’t help but think though that parents will wonder why they can no longer buy the toys they played with quite happily when children themselves, and will question the higher prices for those that are still available.
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Thursday, March 24th, 2011
Our Spring and Summer catalogue is now available and if you’re on our mailing list then you should receive your copy in the post in the next day or two.
There are plenty of new toys, loads of old favourites and lots of fun too!
To get your own copy just visit this page
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Saturday, August 28th, 2010
The Mulberry Bush autumn catalogue is printed and will be in the post to our customers in the next week or so. With 225 new toys and eight more pages, it’s taken us quite a bit of work in the summer months but we’re very pleased with the result and we hope you will be too.
Watch out for those new products becoming available to order on the website over the next few days as we receive stock. And watch out too for even more new items coming on the website. You can use the RSS feed on the “NEW” page of our website. We also aim to post on Twitter and Facebook as soon as the new items are available so those are easy ways for you to be the first to hear about these great new toys. Watch this space !
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Friday, April 2nd, 2010
We’re delighted that our Spring and Summer catalogue is proving popular with our customers but, if you haven’t seen it, you don’t have to wait for the postman. Over the Easter weekend we have introduced an on-line, page-turning copy of the paper catalogue on our website which has a number of helpful features. You can see it here
Every product in the catalogue links through to the corresponding page on the website, so if you like the look of something and want to order it then just click on the picture or text, the associated web-page will come up and you can quickly add it to your basket.
If you already have a paper catalogue, have worked out what you want to order and, maybe, have marked the pages, then it’s a simple matter to flick through the pages on the online version, clicking on each toy you want so as to bring up its’ web-page, then adding it to your shopping basket.
The zoom facility in the bottom toolbar lets you see the pages and the products in very high detail – great if you want to look closely at a particular toy.
There’s a very handy search facility too. Just type in the name or description of the toy you’re looking for in the search box – top right of the screen – and click on the looking glass icon to see all the possibilities that match your search term. Click on that and you’ll go straight to the page where the search term will be highlighted.
If you want you can print your own copy of a page, or all the pages if you like (but if you live in the UK and want a copy it’s probably just as easy to call us or fill in the online form and we’ll send you one) or print the the catalogue order form so as to send an order to us by post, if that is what you’d rather do.
You can even add bookmarks and notes, which will come in handy when Christmas approaches. But let’s not think about that yet please!
So – in summary, a very handy tool. Not a replacement for the website itself, nor for the paper catalogue, but a nice adjunct. It works really well on a brisk broadband connection but might be slower to load if you live some distance from the exchange. Well worth any wait though.
We’d appreciate any feedback. What do you think?
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
The Mulberry Bush Spring and Summer catalogue of wooden toys and games is on its way. If you are already a customer one should be arriving by post in the next few days. If you would like one please enter your details on our catalogue request page and we’ll send you one and add you to our mailing list for future catalogues too. (UK only by post, but the whole range can be seen on the website)
We have quite a number of new products and many old favourites. It’s sign of the times that some prices have had to go up but for the vast majority we have been able to maintain last years price – and there are even some that have gone down!
Posted in Mulberry Bush, News & Views, Traditional Toys | No Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Although VAT reverts to 17.5% from 1st January 2010 Mulberry Bush will not increase prices for items that are in stock. We will be carrying out a full price review before we publish our next catalogue in March, and we know already that some toys may have to go up when we next receive stock because costs to us will be increasing, but we will do all we can to keep our prices competitive, absorbing the increase in VAT ourselves wherever possible.
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Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
All orders placed on or before Monday 21st December were despatched on or before that date. Many were upgraded to 24 hour delivery at our expense to try to ensure they arrived in time for Christmas, even though some were placed after our cut-off date. We have no outstanding orders.
As will be no surprise to anyone the freezing weather has had an effect on deliveries in certain parts of the country but we know ParcelForce and Royal Mail are doing all they can to deliver in time and will be delivering up to and including Christmas Eve.
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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
What are our best selling toys this Christmas? Some of the wooden 
toys we offer are best sellers year after year. In pride of place has to be the fantastic Mini Cakes and Stand which has been immensely popular for a couple of years now, and not surprisingly. The detail is incredible and with 12 mouth-watering wooden cakes plus wooden stand at £11.99 it’s incredible value too.
Another best seller this year and a consistent favourite for 2 or 3 years is the Magic Roller, now available in Red or Purple . If only my knees allowed I’d be riding one myself – fantastic fun, and at £39.99 we know our price is very competitive. Others are selling this same item, sometimes called the Magic Roller, for £49.99 or more.
New this year but already a Best Seller is Le Grand Garage from Le Toy Van, a brightly painted multi-level garage that will give years of enjoyment to car-mad boys or girls who can zoom their cars up and down the ramps, in and out of the lift, round the carpark… It even has a helicopter and heli-pad. A lovely toy.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for us has been how popular Whizzers are. This is the first year we have had them in our range with Girl’s style’s and Boy’s styles, and they are selling equally well. When I was a boy they came as cardboard cutouts on the side of Cornflakes packets, but these wooden ones are much more sophisticated and colourful. In fact so popular have these been we have now run out of some of the styles we started with and have had to switch to other equally colourful and fun designs. Father Christmas has already taken several hundred pairs from us and we fully expect him to order even more as last-minute stocking fillers over the next few weeks. Make sure you ask him to get some for your child!
Posted in Mulberry Bush, News & Views, Traditional Toys, Wooden Toys | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
There’s going to be a shortage of toys this Christmas - so says BBC Breakfast today.
Well for the must-have, toy-of-the-year Barbie Roller Girl or Transformers Movie Leader type of toy that may very well be true. The big distributors have to place their orders in the Far East many months before Christmas, and at the beginning of this year with all the doom and gloom there was it was not surprising that many importers were cautious. Bear in mind too that the face of toy retailing on the High Street was changing hugely at that time with the demise of Woolworth and no obvious replacement for them, the largest toy retailer in Britain. So if the big boys scaled back the numbers then there will of course be a limited supply of some toys.
Yet I seem to remember similar scare stories in the past. I did a quick search on the BBC website and they still have a story from 2003 saying how there would be a toy shortage that Christmas because of SARS – the reason being that few toy buyers would dare to go to China for fear of catching the then dreaded disease. There’s always a reason to try to encourage early buying and that was that year’s.
Here at Mulberry Bush 2009 has been a harder year for obtaining stock but largely we have or will have more than enough of most of our products to see us through to Christmas. There are a small number of products where we have been let down and just can’t get more of, but there is always one or two each year. If you offer well over 500 products there’s bound to be a few that don’t materialise as expected. But we work closely with our suppliers in the summer each year to ensure that they know how many of what we will need, and when. And because we sell Traditional Toys we don’t mind if we do have some stock left after Christmas because birthdays happen all year round and most of our toys are old favourites.
There is one very good reason to shop early for Christmas though which is that the late surge of orders we see every year does mean real pressure to despatch those later orders in time to arrive before the big day. Christmas shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone – it happens every year on December 25th – so to be sure to avoid your own toy shortage please, please do get your order in early !
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Monday, November 9th, 2009
The opportunity for our customers to add their own reviews of their purchases was a recent enhancement to our website just a few weeks ago. Opening up this service was not without some trepidation on our part it has to be said. Most of the conversations we have with you our customers take place before the toy has been bought and whilst we’ve had many, many compliments over the years we never really know what people really think about their purchases after we have sent them to them. Unlike a local toy-shop Mail Order can be a bit arms-length (and we used to have a shop so we know) .
We shouldn’t have worried. The response has been fantastic – approaching 100 reviews across a wide range of products in around 3 weeks and I have to say the majority are very complimentary, and generally enthusiastic. I won’t highlight any particular ones but I will say a big thank-you to all who have responded so quickly to the automatic e-mails that are sent about 3 weeks after an order has been despatched.
Apart from the help to prospective buyers of particular toys through reading others’ unbiased opinions, one unexpected benefit has been the opportunity for us to respond to a complaint. One customer was pretty scathing about a very popular product and it just didn’t make sense. We didn’t publish his comments but we did get in touch with him to find out more and the item was returned to us. It turned out it was faulty and we gave a full refund (we couldn’t replace it as we can’t get any more of that product, but that’s by-the-by). I hope I’ve made the point that we read the reviews we’re getting and they’re helping us in a number of ways – so please keep them coming – as a help to you and us.
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