Toys "R" Us Builds On 'Guest-Friendly' Theme

With 700 toy stores in the United States, Toys "R" Us is a retail dynasty. But even successful dynasties need to step back periodically to assess their goals and make the necessary changes to stay on top.Warren Kornblum knows all about this. He was hired by Toys "R" Us three years ago as executive vice president of worldwide marketing & brand management to help reshape the Paramus, N.J.-based organization. Recently promoted to chief marketing officer, Kornblum is pleased with the way the company is changing and is looking forward to strong sales in the coming years.P-O-P Times spoke with him prior to his scheduled keynote address, "Child's Play: Translating Brand Development Into Global Success at Retail," at The P-O-P Show/Chicago on June 20 in Navy Pier's Grand Ballroom.Congratulations on your promotion. Will your job responsibilities be changing?The new title simply broadens my responsibilities. I'm responsible for Toys "R" Us, both domestically and internationally, toysrus.com, Kids "R" Us and Babies "R" Us. That's basically all of our businesses as a corporation. Fortunately, I have wonderful vice presidents who basically run the marketing of all of those businesses and they, in turn, have great presidents as operating heads of the businesses. The change was really made so that we can share and have a vision of not only what each of our brands are doing, but also so that there's an '"R" Us' focus to everything we do.What's new at Toys "R" Us?We're still focused on execution. It's all about rolling out the plans that we now have in place. Toys "R" Us Times Square in New York City is up and running. In fact, Chain Store Age Magazine just recognized it as The Store of the Year. It's been great.Another exciting thing is that we just hired a vice president of corporate visual marketing. His name is Tom Crossman and he was previously with FAO Schwarz. He's come over to work on my corporate staff, signaling the importance to us of the store as a medium. We're focused on the whole in-store experience. Tom will work with teams from all of our different divisions to elevate the visual as well as the physical experience within our stores.Tell us more about the flagship store in Times Square. When did it open?It officially opened on Nov. 17, and it has been spectacular. We don't mean to be arrogant because it's been a labor of love for us, but for the new management team, it's the first thing we've started from the ground up. To me, the most telling moment with that store occurred on the Sunday before we opened. We invited all of our corporate staff, so that was about 2,500 people with their families. We'd gone through the modeling, the design and the construction, but we'd never really had kids in the store. I was standing beside our chief executive officer as the doors opened and all the kids came rushing in. They ran around marveling at the Ferris Wheel, the 20-foot-tall dinosaur, the huge dollhouse and all the wonderful stuff. We just looked at each other and said, "You know, we've really done something special here."Hopefully, it's something that will be special to New York for along time. And to the toy business. We really look at that store and all our stores as places where our partners in the vendor community can showcase their brands. Everything we've been doing isn't only about getting our brand where it needs to be. It's also about creating an environment where our partners can showcase their brands. We really want to get back to the magic of what it means to be a kid.Another big undertaking at Toys "R" Us has been the conversion to the Mission Possible store format. What can you tell us about how the conversions are going?"Mission Possible" has been our code name for the whole new program. It's been a three-year conversion process, and all of our 700 U.S. stores will be converted to this format by the fourth quarter of 2002.Our Mission Possible format is a much more guest-friendly environment. When you walk in, there's a racetrack design and there are a dozen "worlds" that bring product to life in a logical adjacency fashion. There's far less of the military style, row after row after row. It's much more open, with lower vistas and much more attention was paid to creating environments within the store. There are demo stations. For instance, when you walk into our stores you'll see our associates using karaoke machines and riding skateboards. It really evolves from the concept that when mom is in our stores with her kids, it should really be a fun, open, friendly place where they can find everything they ever wanted to find in the world of toys. Another real fundamental of it is this: We're in the toy business, let's have fun! That's really the basis of the whole program. Open aisles, associates who are there to be helpful, to demonstrate and to interact with our guests as they come in.What about Toys "R" Us' acceptance of vendor-supplied P-O-P? Does it have to be customized exclusively for Toys "R" Us?We work closely with our vendor partners on P-O-P. What we try not to do is just accept the typical P-O-P that goes into a 10-foot linear section of Wal-Mart, Kmart or Target. What we want to do is sit down with them and create P-O-P that fits within our four walls but still reflects their brand in the best way it's reflected anywhere. On most initiatives, we'd rather sit down with a partner and say, "let's find a way that's meaningful for both of us." We really believe our stores should be the places people can go to get the best information available about every brand we carry.What does the future look like for Toys "R" Us?Overall, it's a challenging economy, but we're pleased with where we are. Our entire strategy was always based on multiple years as opposed to short term such as the fourth quarter of 2001. We're pushing forward. We believe in what we're doing and we're seeing results in terms of consumer perception and what we call our Guest Satisfaction Surveys. We have lots of cool things planned.

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