Littlest Pet Shop: Future classic
Hasbro owns a lot of classic toy brands: Nerf, Mr. Potato Head, My Little Pony, Playskool, Tonka and Monopoly, just to name a few. But it was one of the company’s fastest-growing brands, the Littlest Pet Shop, that stole the show at the company’s Licensing Expo booth in June.
“The Littlest Pet Shop is…the No. 1 brand in the mini-doll industry,” said Bryony Bouyer, Hasbro’s senior vp of marketing for the Americas. “Today, we’ve sold 60 million pets since the brand’s introduction in 2005. On average, each girl owns 25. We’ve really gotten a hold of the elusive tween girl market.”
In just one year, the licensing portfolio supporting the Littlest Pet Shop has doubled from 45 deals to more than 90. The toy brand has teamed up with licenses who make everything from apparel and accessories to food and beverages. The Littlest Pet Shop has also found its way to craft activity sets and bath and cell phone accessories. In all, licensed Littlest Pet Shop merchandise has expanded to cover 15 categories.
The brand, which boasts more than 300 unique pets for tween girls to collect, also has an active Web site, which, since its launch, has welcomed 5.6 million unique visitors and nearly 1 million users who are tracking their pets online. “We like to say, ‘The collection is the connection,’ when we talk about the Littlest Pet Shop,” Bouyer said.
“When you look at how girls interact socially at that age, they love to collect things, share things with others and be part of a larger social group in that way… Our Web site allows girls to list the pets they have in their collection and also identify which ones they want to add. They are sharing and [are] part of a larger online community.”
In addition to the popularity of its Web site as a social networking outlet, the look of The Littlest Pet Shop dolls has been an element of the brand’s success, Bouyer said. “We say that the look is the hook—the pets’ appearance is distinctive with their large eyes and fun accessories. Pets have a bobblehead and a magnet to activate features in the play sets and pet accessories,” Bouyer explained.
Hasbro launched The Littlest Pet Shop with a redesigned look in 2005, basing the brand on an animated television series that debuted in 1995, from Sunbow Productions and DiC Entertainment. The show chronicled the lives, and adventures, of five miniature animals who lived in a pet shop on Littlest Lane.
Although the show was based on a popular line of Kenner toys, the characters bore little resemblance to the toy line beyond sharing the same name. A few toy lines were made that were directly based on the television series between 1992 and 1996, but none of them enjoyed the success of the redesigned Hasbro line that launched ten years after the show first aired.
Based on the success of The Littlest Pet Shop, both as a toy line and as a licensed brand, Hasbro is now focusing on expanding the brand’s popularity overseas, in countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Italy. “Hasbro has a presence in more than 100 countries—and with the concept of connectivity and the brand’s Web site being so integral to its success, there’s no reason why this will not be just as successful everywhere,” Bouyer said.