Toys ‘R’ Us is set to return this holiday season with the opening of several stores in the U.S. following its closure last year.
Sources close to the beloved toy retailer said the company will make a seasonal comeback with the opening of a half dozen stores and an e-commerce site, Bloomberg reported.
Richard Barry, a former Toys ‘R’ Us executive who is now CEO of new entity Tru Kids Inc., is understood to have explored ways to to reincarnate the chain to toymakers at an industry gathering this week.
Sources close to the now defunct beloved toy retailer said the company will make a seasonal comeback with the opening of a half dozen stores and an e-commerce site. Pictured above, the exterior of the Toys R Us store in Kingston, MA, before it closed
The stores are expected to be about 10,000-square feet, roughly a third of the size of the brand’s big-box outlets that closed last year, according to sources.
There will also be play areas in some locations with the possibility that toymakers ship goods but don’t get paid until consumers buy them as part of a consignment inventory model.
A spokeswoman for Tru Kids told Bloomberg that the company was not yet ready to publicly share details on its U.S. strategy.
Barry is the CEO of Tru Kids, Inc., a new company that took over the Toys ‘R’ Us brand earlier this year.
‘Effective January 20, 2019, the new company, Tru Kids Inc. doing business as Tru Kids Brands, became the proud parent of Toys R Us, Babies R Us, Geoffrey and more than 20 established consumer toy and baby brands,’ Tru Kids Brands said in a statement in February.
The company claimed its brand power remains as Toys ‘R’ Us and Babies’ ‘R’ Us generated over $3 billion in global retail sales in 2018 through more than 900 stores and e-commerce businesses in 30+ countries across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Despite unprecedented efforts to capture the U.S. market share this past holiday season, there is still a significant gap and huge consumer demand for the trusted experience that Toys ‘R’ Us delivers, Barry said in February.
He added: ‘We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to write the next chapter of Toys ‘R’ Us by launching a newly imagined omni channel retail experience for our beloved brands here in the U.S. In addition, our strong global footprint is led by experienced and passionate operating teams that are 100% focused on growth.’
In March 2018, the iconic retail chain that had captivated American kids for generations, announced plans to shut all of its US stores, becoming one of the biggest casualties of the retail shakeout amid the rise of e-commerce.
Former Toys ‘R’ Us executive Richard Barry, (pictured), is reportedly exploring ways of reviving the company, including the creation of an e-commerce site
The debt-plagued company had filed a motion for bankruptcy court approval to liquidate its US operations.
Started in 1948 by World War II veteran Charles Lazarus at a single store in the US capital Washington, called “Children’s Bargain Town,” the company began calling itself Toys ‘R’ Us in 1957 and went public in 1978 after a period of heavy growth.
It remained a retail force through the 1980s, but its star began to fade in the 1990s as big box stores such as Walmart and Target began selling more toys — at lower prices.
In 2005, it yielded to the pressure, and was taken private by a consortium of investors that included the KKR Group and Bain Capital — a move that saddled the company with billions of dollars of debt.
More recently, Toys ‘R’ Us has been buffeted by the competition from Amazon and other online vendors, which has generated bankruptcies across the retail sector and created a generation of “dead malls” nationwide, amid a shift away from brick-and-mortar to click-and-deliver.
At the time, analysts said the demise of Toys ‘R’ Us in the US would prove to be a big blow to the toy industry.
The company’s sales had fallen in recent years, but still came in at $11.5 billion in 2017, including $7.1 billion in the US.