Aitana against TikTok: Famosa's order to extend the life of the dolls

For the first time in her 55 years of life, the Nancy doll has taken on the features of a celebrity. This is the Catalan singer Aitana, who, in the opinion of those responsible for the Famosa toy company, demonstrates in each of her concerts that she reaches several generations of potential consumers. With it, the Alicante firm aims to fight against the progressive advance of the age at which girls stop playing to enter the universe of social networks, which, according to its reports, has dropped to 7 or 8 years. The play did not go badly. Nancy Aitana is the tenth best-selling brand in the sector so far this year and last November, when the Christmas campaign begins, it became the second in Spain. “We have to adapt to the new children's social patterns,” says Irene Sotillo, director of marketing from Famosa. Create products that keep the little ones away from social networks that “encourage them to give up toys to dedicate themselves to other things.”

Precocious maturity has combined with the decline in the birth rate in Spain to reduce customers from the toy sector in recent years. “Before, girls played with dolls until they were 12 years old,” explains Sotillo. With the arrival of networks like Instagram or TikTok, mainly, the abandonment of toys was brought forward to “the age of nine, but now it has come forward again.” A circumstance that forces Famosa's creatives not to let their main asset, the Nancy, which sold ten million units in just a decade since its launch in 1968, “stay stuck in the past.” “Nancy always represented that friend whom her parents let be the most modern,” says Sotillo, and “she has known how to adapt to the values ​​and circumstances of each era.” She was the first, for example, to use the mask during the Covid pandemic, “so that children would normalize its use when it was mandatory.” She also had a model youtuber, with which users “could record videos on a secure channel.” Nancy allied herself with the Spanish women's soccer team “before they won the World Cup.” And, now, she plays the most successful Spanish singer, “who is liked by mothers, girls and teenagers, unifies all sales objectives” and who has become the first star with her own doll from the Alicante brand. Nancy and Aitana, “two icons together,” says the board.

six decades

The first celebrity arrives at Famosa 66 years after its founding in 1957 in Onil (Alicante, 7,580 inhabitants), a municipality that gave its name to the company with the acronym Fábricas Agrupadas de Muñecas de Onil, Sociedad Anónima. After the impact of Nancy, and the Christmas carol from the 1972 advertisement, which marked an entire generation and once again starred in the brand's advertising in 2017, Barriguitas, Nenuco and Pin y Pon were born. In 2005, the owners bought Feber, a company that is mainly dedicated to outdoor installations such as houses or swings, and Play by Play, a division focused on stuffed animals. In 2010, a venture capital fund, Sun Capital, bought the Colivenca firm and three years later reduced the distance to the Belén portal to which the dolls go by 43 kilometers, those that separate Onil from Alicante, according to the announcement. The factory was moved to the Atalayas industrial estate in the provincial capital, where, in the opinion of its managers, it had better access for transportation that improved the company's logistics. “The transfer occurred without paralyzing the production process,” Sotillo emphasizes, “molds of dolls were taken to Alicante while others remained in Onil,” until the entire chain was complete. The Alicante factory, which has 549 workers, thus left what is known as the Toy Valley, which brings together the municipalities of Onil, Ibi and Castalla and which concentrates more than a third of the workers and just under 40% of the turnover. of the sector throughout Spain, according to data managed by the Spanish Association of Toy Manufacturers (AEFJ).

In 2019, Famosa changed hands again. The largest toy group in Europe, the Italian Giochi Preziosi, bought the factory, with which Famosa has since distributed its brands in Spain. After the first year of implementation, the new owners had to face the 2020 pandemic and the transport freight conflict a year later. “In 2022 we continue to suffer,” acknowledges the management of the company, which that year had a turnover of 173 million in sales with “great growth in Latin America”, thanks to the implementation of a subsidiary in Mexico, “and from the sale of stuffed animals after reach agreements with large licenses.” The forecast for the 2023 academic year is to consolidate the same income figure as a year before, like the rest of the Spanish toy sector, which hopes to remain one or two points up or down compared to the 2022 numbers.

To settle the accounts, Famosa opts for different strategies for its products. Thus, while Nancy is put in the spotlight with the Aitana model, Nenuco is dedicated to “diversity and social integration”, with the aim of promoting “the values ​​necessary to care for any newborn.” In 2023, they launched “a model with Down syndrome and another with a cochlear implant” for her baby, in addition to innovating in accessories, such as the backpacks with which parents carry their children on their chests.

For their part, Pin y Pon, who have their own television series, approached during the last Christmas campaign the magic and terror generated by the character of Wednesday Addams, another audiovisual production that has been broadcast on the Netflix platform. In the case of Barriguitas, it is “a product premium, intended for homesick mothers and grandmothers,” according to Sotillo. And, finally, Feber is “the key to deseasonalizing” sales, since it manufactures outdoor products in Alicante that are launched in the summer campaign. With them, the company tries to reduce dependence on Christmas, a period in which toy companies still concentrate between 25% and 30% of their total turnover, according to AEFJ. At the moment, Famosa has not addressed the possibility of entering the most rising segment of the sector, that of kidults (contraction of the words child and adult in English).

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