Can Toys’R’Us Become the First Zombie Brand to Truly Come Back From the Dead?

The news that WHP Global plans to launch 24 “flagships” of its Toys’R’Us brand is one of the most intriguing developments in the wonderful world of retail we’ve seen in a long time.

Aside from the fact that having two dozen flagships is kind of silly – flagships are meant to be one, at most two or three, high-profile stores that are a cut above the rest of a retail chain —  if they can pull this off, it could mark the first real time a brand given up for dead has come back to life as physical stores.

Sure, many retail nameplates from most recently Bed Bath & Beyond all the way back to Montgomery Ward and too many others to mention have all returned under new owners after crashing and burning in their original formats. But in virtually every occurrence it’s been online only and frankly most have been pretty pathetic compared to their historical namesakes.

And TRU itself has been resurrected itself, previously under former owners and more recently by WHP as departments within about 480 Macy’s stores. They’ve even opened one physical store in New Jersey’s American Dream mall-entertainment mash-up.

Now they are talking about something more significant. Details are still somewhat sketchy but apparently there are going to be 24 of these ersatz flagship locations that will “complement” the Macy’s stores plus some unknown number of Toys stores in airports and on cruise ships that would seem to be departments within existing retailers, at least it seems based on the first of these slated to open in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport in a duty free store. Other locations haven’t been specified yet.

None of these stores – the existing Macy’s departments or the single NJ store – bare much if any resemblance to the cavernous warehouse formats that made TRU the originator of the category-killer format and a huge success for so many years. These new retail outlets are more like toy boutiques with heavily edited – please don’t use the word curated, I beg you – product assortments geared towards Barbies, Hot Wheels and whatever the latest hot toy item is in any given city.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Certainly shoppers aren’t expected 60,000-square-foot warehouses with 12-foot shelfing on a cruise ship. Just having Geoffrey out front welcoming visitors in is a reassuring sign for all those Toys’R’Us kids now grown up who have morphed into Toys’R’Us parents.

Lots of other brand owners have talked about this kind of initiative but frankly nobody has been able to pull this off, including TRU’s former owners who got to two stores before Covid and a questionable business model did them in. So you have to give WHP credit for attempting this retail Houdini-like magic trick.

But will it work? Since the original Toys went under five years ago, the retail landscape for toys has changed dramatically. Certainly Amazon has become a much bigger player but so too have Walmart and Target which saw an opening and jumped into it with expanded toy offerings. Still, the slot for a year-round, dedicated toy store on a national level remains vacant and TRU has as good a shot at anybody at claiming it with unquestionably the best brand name in the business.

It remains, however, a tough one to pull off. Other than those strictly related to a specific holiday like Halloween or Easter, no business in all of retailing is as seasonal as toys, not even patio furniture or snow shovels. Enough off-season sales to support these stores is always going to be a challenge. But the original TRU pulled it off with its very different model and it was private equity-driven debt and bad management decisions that did it in, not its revenue model.

Lots of people in retailing would like WHP to succeed with this plan. There are so many other walking-dead brands out there that could benefit from a role model like a profitable Toys’R’Us revival.

So let’s see what these dozens of “flagships” look like and how big the cruise ships kiosks actually are. The bulk of these stores are all slated to open in the back end of 2024. Maybe then we’ll know if it’s coal or candy in WHP’s Christmas stocking.