David Catton, senior buyer at Morrisons, tells Toy World how the company is updating and revamping its toy offering and exploring fresh opportunities within the sector.

According to David, 2023 was a good year for Morrisons’ Toy category. The supermarket chain hit its internal metrics despite the challenges most retailers experienced – poor summer weather and consumer spending concerns chief among them.

2024 is a new year, however, and Morrisons is under new management. Rami Baitiéh, a French businessman of Lebanese ancestry and the former CEO of Carrefour, took up the reins at Morrisons in November 2023. Under Rami’s leadership, the retailer has benefitted from a reinvigorated overall offering. The impact of this is starting to be seen in the supermarket’s sales figures, with footfall also up versus the same period 2023.

Having previously held buying roles at Tesco and Sainsburys, David has been Morrisons’ Toy buying manager for two and a half years out of the decade he’s worked for the retailer. When he moved to Toys just after the pandemic, the team was small: it was just him and one merchandiser. The category was facing turbulence in the logistics industry, which encouraged David’s team to focus its buying efforts on domestic lines instead those shipped from the Far East, but now things are returning to normal, the mix is being rebalanced. Last year the team expanded its headcount to five and pleasingly, senior management at Morrisons has recently identified Toys as a growth category – and therefore one worthy of more time and investment.

Morrisons currently works with around 60 suppliers, 10 of which could be considered primary suppliers, the next five secondary, the following five after that tertiary and the remainder more transactional. The space dedicated to toys in most Morrisons stores is modest, anywhere between a quarter to a half of what you would see in larger competitors, making category delineation tricky. Despite this, the depth and breadth of toys on offer is impressive, with all the top brands represented, and David believes that metre for metre, Morrisons toy sales are very competitive.

To read the full profile, which appears in the May issue of Toy World, click here.