In this Company Profile, Sara Taylor, MGA Entertainment’s new UK & Ireland managing director, tells Toy World how she plans to build upon MGA’s success to date.

Sara Taylor is on a mission to to ‘stabilise’ MGA from the top down and further improve relationships with the company’s partners. With new toy and content launches, a hugely streamlined warehousing operation and much more, 2023 is looking extremely promising for the company.

“We’re heading into 2023 in a much better situation than we were in at the start of 2022,” Sara Taylor tells Toy World’s Rachael Simpson Jones. “This time last year, we had double the amount of on-hand and in-transit inventory than we do today, and that inventory has taken us the best part of the year to clear down. Starting 2023 with a much cleaner stock holding puts us in a far stronger position. We also saw some record sales weeks during November 2022; while the market was down -5% in the month, MGA was up +0.4%*. Overall, according to NPD data last month, we are the No.5 corporate manufacturer in the UK, year to date*.”

Sara says MGA has worked hard on bringing innovation to its brands, (major launches keep rolling out, with Make it Mini Food collections appearing in November, closely followed by L.O.L. Surprise! Sweets) whilst being mindful of the economic uncertainties we face heading into 2023, and reports that the company is now in one single MGA dedicated warehouse in Doncaster.

“Warehousing and logistics has been our biggest challenge over the past two years,” she explains. “I know this has caused a huge amount of disruption and frustration for our customers. I would like to personally thank each and every one of them for bearing with us through these turbulent waters and am looking forward to delivering a great service in 2023. It’s exciting to see what we’ll now be able to achieve with these improvements firmly in place.”

Sara also talks us through what there is to look forward to this year in terms of product launches, retail activations and content.

She concludes: “Now we have everything in place – people, product, warehousing – 2023 is going to be a lot easier, and more fun, than it has been the past few years.”

You can read the full article with Sara Taylor, which appeared in the January edition of Toy World, here.

(*data from The NPD Group UK, November 2022).