Why Adults Are Driving the Toy Industry | Nilay Verma, Hasbro

Would an Indian family pay for a branded water gun?

Hasbro wasn’t sure. So they put a small batch of Nerf Super Soakers on one e-commerce platform before Holi and waited. Nilay Verma, who leads Hasbro across India and Southeast Asia, on what happened next.

Water play is not an evolved category in India. The weather only supports it in parts of the country, the season is effectively one month, and there is already a cheap, universally understood product: the pichkari. Committing annual forecast to a branded imported-standard water blaster against that was not obviously sensible.

So Hasbro treated it as an experiment rather than a launch, and the way it ran that experiment is the most useful thing in this conversation. Nilay spoke to Ragini about it, along with why quick commerce is India’s answer to the convenience store, and why the toy aisle stopped belonging to children.

Three cycles, not one forecast

Year one, they went with a single e-commerce partner, a very small volume, and a small campaign. It sold out in about 15 days. That was interesting but not conclusive, so they waited a full cycle rather than reading it as proof.

Year two, they took the volume up ten times, expanded the assortment and put a local nuance into the campaign, extending only to a few key offline retailers because they didn’t want unsold inventory stuck with anyone. It sold out in two days.

Only then did they open it across channels with the full Super Soaker range behind a campaign built around one line: play Holi with Nerf. It is now, Nilay says, among the highest market-share water play blasters in the country, in a phenomenon that happens over roughly one month a year. And all of it is made in India.

Localisation is not a translated logo

Monopoly Cricket ran the same logic in reverse. There was no global cricket version of Monopoly, but the mechanics and identity held while the theme changed. It worked well enough in India that other markets, including the UK and parts of the Pacific, asked for it. An idea built for India became exportable.

The same thinking put Monopoly into multiple Indian languages, which came from watching how shoppers behaved in stores rather than from a strategy document. A parent living away from their home state might use a regional-language board game to help a child pick up the mother tongue faster. Hasbro even ran a micro-campaign with a small set of hypermarkets in Kerala purely so the Malayalam edition landed where it would resonate. Play-Doh got the same treatment, with a campaign built around children making festival idols out of dough.

Every channel has a different job

India skipped a step other markets took. There was never a real convenience store format here; the market moved from single-channel dependency straight to quick commerce, which Nilay describes as India’s answer to the 7-Eleven.

That changes what you stock where. In a toy specialty store the shopper is discovering, so the brand has to come alive: wide assortment, experiential presentation, room to handle the product. By the time someone opens a quick commerce app, the discovery has already happened. They know the brand, the price point and the occasion, and they need it fast. So that channel gets the recognisable products at the right price points, not a discovery journey.

Two people decide every toy purchase

The child comes to a toy for the character and the play. The parent is looking for safety, age suitability and durability. A product that delights one and worries the other has failed.

Nilay’s standard for safety is deliberately plain: if there is a crash in play, it should not hurt the child, and any part should perform for the millions of cycles it is tested for without disappointing the child when a spring stops behaving. It is a quality the child never notices and the parent buys on.

The aisle stopped being for children

Young adults are among the fastest-evolving parts of the category, and they don’t call these things toys. They call them collectibles, or accessories. A Transformers Optimus Prime on a desk is an expression of identity, not a plaything. Hasbro sets no upper age limit, and sees people in their twenties, thirties and forties engaging with the brands.

Which means retailers have to merchandise by play pattern rather than by age. Nilay has seen stores create sections marked for ages 40 and up. An action figure enthusiast should not have to walk three aisles to find related properties. Board game buyers want the same navigation they get online: party games here, family games there, card games, long-form strategy. The physical aisle borrowing the taxonomy of an e-commerce site is, in his view, simply better for the shopper.

What Hasbro makes here, and what India still can’t

Hasbro has partnered with Indian manufacturers since the early nineties and is now one of the biggest toy exporters out of the country, sourcing product made to global quality standards for Western and Asian markets. Nerf and action figures among them.

He is candid about the gap. The ecosystem here is strong on plush and paper-based toys. Electronic toys, more evolved play, more intricate parts, that is where India is still growing, and where he credits BIS standards and government support for MSME manufacturers with moving things forward.

The number he actually wants

Asked what data he wishes he had, Nilay picks the one nobody can give him: what the consumer will want six months from now. Toy companies commit to film properties and manufacture inventory long before anyone knows whether the film works.

His conclusion on the rest is unsentimental. E-commerce has democratised distribution, so distribution is no longer the moat. Innovation has to be baked into the product first, then communication aimed at a precise audience rather than a generic need. Without that, wider reach just places your product beside more things that look like it.

Listen to the full conversation with Nilay Verma on FyndOutWithRagini.