Paul Laine doesn’t consider himself an aggressive man. In fact, he’s excessively polite. He buys me a coffee and makes charming small talk until we get to his Christmas Toy Red Mist Rage Incident. ‘It was 2014, the year Frozen was huge, and my daughters were so into the film,’ he begins. ‘The only thing they wanted for Christmas was an Elsa doll.’ His wife gave him one job, he explains. Buy the dolls.
So, in mid-December, Paul went shopping. Argos? Sold out. Disney Store? Nothing. Hamleys? No chance. Paul started to panic. ‘But then, in John Lewis I find one Elsa doll. And some bloke and his daughter are just about to get to it before me.’ In desperation, Paul barged in front of the hapless dad, snatched the doll from the shelf and ran. He could hear the guy protesting behind him. ‘I was shoving people aside like a prop forward until I got to kitchen appliances. I paid for the doll in the carpets department and pushed my way to the exit as fast as I could. I haven’t been back there since because of the CCTV.’
Paul was far from alone that year. One New York mother reported visiting more than 42 stores desperately seeking Elsa. In Dublin, police were called to a retail park after parents queuing overnight to buy Elsa dolls almost rioted. What leads nice grown men to rugby-tackle strangers for a 17-inch plastic princess? How are these Christmas crazes born? I’ve always imagined secret ‘Christmas craze’ squads squirrelled away at the major toy manufacturers, tasked with coming up with next year’s must-have, testing them on children, then devising sneaky strategies to create the buzz that leads to hysteria.
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The truth, it turns out, is the opposite. ‘No toy company is going to manufacture a fad deliberately,’ says John Baulch, publisher of Toy World magazine. Fads run on shortages, he explains. The results? ‘They’re just leaving money on the table. The costs escalate when you have to make more in response, then air freight them.’ By ship is cheaper but it takes too long to reach the UK from China, he explains, during a bonafide craze. All in all: ‘If your sales boom even in October, it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to restock shelves with any kind of profit margin for December.’
In fact, in Elsa’s case, a terrible but common mistake had been made. Not realising how big the movie would be, Disney had simply failed to order enough Elsa dolls. In March 2014, however, it topped $1bn at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time up to that point. Plenty of time to react and respond ahead of Christmas 2014 demand, you might think. After all, Christmas is make or break. In the UK, December alone accounts for 21% of annual toy sales, the equivalent of all January to April sales combined, says Melissa Symonds, executive director at UK Toys, Circana.
Yet, much like Frozen back in 2014, the Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters is once again terrifying some in the toy trade. When the film dropped this June, Netflix hadn’t foreseen the hit, let alone prepared merchandise. It had to rapidly clone cuddly toys given to the crew at the end of production and only filed its patent in July. So, if you can find any Demon Hunters merch now, buy it.
Even if you don’t have kids, the eBay profits will be huge. And here’s why. ‘The toys for Christmas 2026 are first announced at the LA toy fair in September 2025,’ explains John. That’s where buyers at the big shops decide what they’re putting on their shelves that Christmas, and in what numbers.
But inside the toy companies: ‘People will already have been developing and designing the toys for anything up to two years if it’s a movie tie-in,’ he explains. ‘So by the time Frozen was a hit at the start of 2014, the toys for that Christmas had already been ordered. Production started in February. The industry is making guesses far ahead.’
To dig into the mechanisms behind Christmas toy crazes, you have to travel even further back in time, to the great Cabbage Patch Doll craze of 1983. In preceding eras, companies had set up or partnered with local factories around the world. Cabbage Patch Kids, on the other hand, were produced in China, much like 75% of the world’s toys today. In fact, China is now home to more than 8,000 toy firms, most in Guangdong province. It’s a long, slow journey to the UK – roughly six weeks to make the orders and pack them into a container ship, which then takes another six weeks to reach the UK.
Accordingly, by February this year, the big toy companies had to show concepts for next Christmas (that’s 2026) to their biggest US retailers – almost two years ahead. That’s when early orders are estimated. Some toys will fall away by the LA fair in September but, by the London Toy Fair in January, everything is locked in. The course is set, but, in the end, the kids have the final say. ‘The industry can be certain something’s going to take off and be absolutely massive, then kids look at it and shrug,’ says John.
If predicting what movie merch is going to connect with kids is a nightmare, then anticipating other Christmas crazes is harder still for toy companies. After all, licensed toys attached to a movie or other media only account for 35% of toys sold and Lego is still the UK’s most popular toy. Mattel (owner of Barbie and Hot Wheels) has kids and families play with new toys at its Imagination Center, under designer supervision. This
should give them an idea of what will sell. Yet Mattel still released the controversial pregnant Midge and the Creatable World gender netural doll line, in which each doll’s hair and clothing could be changed to make it male or female.
Mysteriously, using kids to help design toys is as much a hit-and-miss affair as getting adults to do it. Which is why most of the industry doesn’t use kids in the design phase.
More mysterious still is what Christopher Byrne, a US-based toy consultant and historian, calls a pure toy fad – something that comes out of nowhere and, for reasons no one understands or has predicted, suddenly becomes this year’s must- have. Think Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, Tickle Me Elmo, Tracy Island, Zhu Zhu Pets and, this year’s contender, Labubu dolls. When it comes to these toys: ‘They [toy companies] manufacture the number they expect to sell based on the number of orders that they get,’ Christopher explains.
‘Then they suddenly lose control of the situation. Maybe it appears on TV, maybe it just strikes a chord, and so the toy leaps out of a preschool product into a cultural event. Furbies were brilliantly marketed but Tiger Electronics just wasn’t prepared for them to take over the cultural imagination. They sold 1.8m units in the first Christmas year and 14m the next.’
Legend has it that the Tickle Me Elmo fad was sparked by daytime talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell playing with the squidgy toy on her show. But these days, TV has lost a lot of its power. ‘TikTok, YouTube and Roblox are where children discover what’s cool,’ explains Amy Spooner, MD of VerriBerri. Even the best, most meticulous marketing strategies can’t account for these unexpected fads, says Lisa Morgan, MD of kids marketing agency Generation Media. Because after all, who knows whether a Kardashian or K-pop star is going to pick up your strange, furry monster, pin it to their handbag and spark a craze. ‘You tend to get at least one to two of these a year, something that becomes a craze that just takes off that no one planned for,’ says Lisa. ‘Then the counterfeits tend to follow and that creates a whole host of other issues.’
In 2014, customs and trading standards officers seized hundreds of fake Elsa dolls, many containing harmful chemicals or small, detachable parts that posed a choking hazard to children. When I explain this to Paul, he pauses for a while. ‘My kids are all grown up and those days have passed,’ he says eventually. ‘But on that weekend, if I’d run out of the stores and seen some bloke selling dodgy Elsa dolls on a tray in Oxford Street, I’d have bought them. Mate, you don’t understand. Whatever Elsa says, there was no way I could Let It Go.’
