Moose Toys booms during Covid as Manny Stul banks on Bluey, Magic Mixies for Christmas

He might be the boss one of the most fun — and incredibly successful — companies but it’s still serious business for Manny Stul.

Moose Toys billionaire owner Manny Stul, aboard ‘Moose Air’..

Billionaire Manny Stul might be the boss of one of the most fun – and incredibly successful – companies in Australia.

Stul and his family have built Moose Toys into a global powerhouse from suburban Melbourne and, only a few years after a worldwide transformational success with the Shopkins range of toys, Moose has rolled out more smash hits this year.

There is the Bluey range based on the hit TV series that Stul jokes has American kids saying “mum instead of momma”, and the Magic Mixies Magic Cauldron that he says “is unbelievable and probably the most innovative toy in the last 10 years worldwide, and one of the most incredible things we’ve ever seen … and will probably win toy of the year”.

Thanks to deals with Amazon, Walmart and Target, Moose is likely to hit the $850m revenue mark this year, with e-commerce sales in the US increasing 125 per cent alone.

It would be a record result, Stul says, fuelled by the Magic Mixies phenomenon that has sales of the interactive toy – that comes with a cauldron, spell book and wand – soaring.

“Everything we have produced we have sold out, the day it hits the stores it sells out,” Stul says.

“Amazon has sold their entire allocation – and it was a big allocation – in the first two weeks. We can’t produce any more.”

Yet Christmas is looming and Stul admits Moose is unable to ­escape the crunch that will hit retailers around the world. While revenue this year will be a record, it could have been even higher.

“The supply issues are by far the worst I’ve ever seen,” says the 72-year-old Stul, who has been in retail for four decades. “For sure there will be a shortage at Christmas, not just us. Not just here, but worldwide.”

Moose has survived Covid and the collapse of Toys R Us in the US, its biggest market, and its entire 600 staff around the world working at home during the pandemic. But the difficulties of making products and moving them around the world have presented Stul and his management team – led by wife Jacqui Tobias and stepson Paul Solomon – a huge logistical challenge.

“Factory production costs, power costs, shipping containers, getting containers into a port let alone onto a boat. There’s so much backing up in a destination like America. Truck drivers are hard to get,” Stul says.

“Then trying to get the stock to retailers. Each one of those challenges is hard, and also the expense too. Containers that were going for $2000-$3000 are now going for $20,000-$25,000.

“Our main focus is the consumer, and making sure the consumer is happy with the product and getting the product to the consumer. You name it, we are trying to do it.”

But he admits he is conscious about the race to get products to consumers by Christmas, with tastes and trends in the cutthroat toy industry quickly moving on.

Kids with Magic Mixies Pink Caldron by Moose Toys.

“We are in the fashion industry, really. So we are doing everything to get the toys out by Christmas, otherwise you have a massive overhang into next year – that affects us. There will be something else bigger and brighter by then for people to buy, so we are very aware of that,” he says.

Stul believes the global supply chain issues will probably last another year, by which time he will be celebrating more than two decades at the helm of Moose.

It has been a remarkable journey for the entrepreneur, who arrived in Australia with his Polish World War II refugee parents in 1950 and went on to float homeware and giftware Skansen on the ASX before buying a small, struggling Melbourne toy firm called Moose in 2000 when semi-retired and looking for something to do.

Moose is now one of the biggest and most successful toy companies in the world, built up from its Melbourne headquarters in suburban Moorabbin, where a giant treehouse “grows” through its centre via a beanstalk, next to a restored Douglas DC-3 aeroplane secretly installed over a weekend and used as one of the more unique meeting rooms in an office anywhere.

Pre-Covid the office bustled with activity and creativity, as Stul fondly recalls. “Philosophically, one of the most important things in life is to get up in the morning and look forward to your day. Culture is a very subjective thing, it’s like an energy you can feel. You know when you walk into a room and feel uncomfortable? That feeling is the exact [opposite] of what it is like to work at Moose.”

The Moose Toys family: Paul Solomon, Jacqui Tobias and Manny Stul.

But when the pandemic hit, while Moose has kept supporting causes like the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital and Clown Doctors around the world, it suddenly had to also support 600 staff globally used to working closely together on innovative projects.

“We’re a creative company so you need to get everybody together and share ideas, so we pivoted quickly and adopted every possible practice to keep everyone happy and engaged,” Stul says, listing new strategies introduced such as extra days off for staff to focus on mental health, toys delivered to employees’ children and online fitness and yoga classes.

Before then, there had been the 2018 collapse of the Toys R Us chain, which had been a vital partner of Moose. Stul says it was “traumatic and costly” for his company and “it wasn’t pleasant”, but says the financial losses were in the single-digit millions of ­dollars.

It also presented Moose with its biggest opportunity, pivoting to a deeper focus on online sales, including strengthening relationships with Amazon, Target and Walmart that have since experienced an e-commerce sales boom during the pandemic. “And because of that we have changed our marketing strategy and our advertising, shifting more towards parent targeted digital advertising,” Stul says, given parents make the buying decisions online.

A child with a giant Bluey stuffed toy by Moose Toys.

While Magic Mixies have helped fuel the sales boom, Stul says licensing deals with brands such as Bluey, the Octonauts cartoon series and Marvel have helped smooth out revenue peaks and troughs between the rolling out of the company’s hit toys.

Moose also has bedded down its only acquisition, the New Worlds toy company in the UK in 2018 that opened up European markets. It now sells directly in countries such as France and Germany rather than using a distributor, which Stul says means a short-term revenue hit that is later offset by having control over pricing and shipping.

Stul also is determined to keep Moose in private hands. He says he has already experienced life as an ASX-listed firm with Skansen and “doesn’t want to ever do that again”, and has also fended off interest from private equity and other potential buyers.

“You lose a bit of the magic if you do that,” Stul says, though he admits Solomon, Moose’s co-chief executive, will assume more of a leadership role over time as he and Tobias step back.

Otherwise, Stul says the focus is now on coming up with the next successful toy that wins the hearts and minds of children worldwide.

“We’re already working on 2023. When do you know you have a hit? Intuitively. It comes from experience. It is very hard to define. But we knew the moment with Magic Mixies when we figured out we could develop and make it. There was no doubt in our minds it would work from there.”