President’s Letter – December 13, 2011: A Year of
Accomplishment and Growth
TIA’s many initiatives and accomplishments in 2011 provided a
great deal of value to our members, making this past year a remarkable
one for TIA. Here are some highlights:
- We amended our Bylaws to include Retailers, Licensors, Toy
Inventors/Designers and Sales Reps as full regular members;
- We restarted our annual “ToyCon” industry conference as
“PlayCon” with enhanced programming;
- We added an SVP for Technical Affairs to our staff to provide
expertise on toy industry technical issues;
- We achieved amendments to the CPSIA adopted in 2008 to alleviate
burdens caused by unintended aspects of the original legislation;
- We achieved extraordinary visibility in mainstream media for our Toy
Industry Foundation philanthropy for children in need;
- We strengthened our relationship with the Licensing Industry
Merchandiser’s Association (LIMA) and helped foster relationships
between members of the toy and licensing industries by hosting a joint
TIA/LIMA business lounge at Toy Fair, as well as a TIA lounge for our
members at the Licensing Show in Las Vegas;
- We launched “Toy Day” in Sacramento to build relations
with California legislators.
I am glad to say that with all of this added activity, we
nevertheless managed to restore our financial reserves to the prudent
levels we enjoyed before the regulatory crises began in 2007-08, and we
have more exciting new ideas and plans for 2012. After all, this
is the toy business, where 80% of our products are new each year, so TIA
has to keep up!
We are grateful for the loyal support of our members, the hard work
and talent of our capable staff, and the stable economics of our
industry. Thank you to all of you for helping make this one of the most
successful years in the history of this great Association.
Warmest regards for the holidays!
ckeithley@toyassociation.org
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