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Companies are dealing with the limited space in shipping containers and their increased costs.
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Toymakers are pivoting to selling small, squishy toys so they can fit more on board, CNN reported.
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They predict fewer big toys available in stores this year.
The limited space on shipping containers and increased price of using them has led toymakers to focus on shipping soft, squishy toys this holiday season, CNN reported.
Jay Foreman, the chief executive of toymaker Basic Fun, told CNN that he was struggling to find space on shipping containers and that the space he could find was wildly expensive.
He said that, in other years, the company could ship whatever it wanted, but this year it needed to find a solution, and decided to embrace soft toys.
"It's a simple case of how much sales volume fits in the container when containers are hard to come by," he said, adding that for smaller soft toys, "the packages are the size of a golf ball."
Yogibo, a company that sells toys, home decor, and bedding, told CNN that it was focusing on shipping small toys instead of bedding. Its CEO, Eyal Levy, said "they take up much less space and offer a higher value for the same amount of volume."
Rick Derr, the owner of Learning Express Toys in Lake Zurich, Illinois, also told CNN that his company was also going to focus on smaller items, and that "bigger items" would be scarcer this year.
Toys have been one of the worst-impacted categories by the supply chain crisis. Delays, shortages, and rising costs meant that toymakers have reported millions of dollars worth of products being stuck in factories or in containers on ships, unable to get to where they need to be.
One of the world's largest toymakers, MGA International, said it's spending around $20,000 on a single shipping container, and that previously this would have cost around $2,000.
MGA CEO Isaac Larian recently told Bloomberg that he hdsn't experienced a situation like this in his 40-year career. "Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the same time," he said.
Experts are advising customers to stock up early for the holidays and to be prepared to spend more.
And at this point, there's no indication that things will get any better by 2022, they say.
"Things are really bad ... it's like a huge rubber band that keeps getting stretched further and further," Dave Marcotte, longtime retail and supply chain expert from Kantar Consulting, said in a recent conversation with Insider.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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