Toys”R”Us Canada will find a new retail home in another Canadian store. The first Staples to launch a Toys”R”Us will do so on Nov. 14 in Richmond Hill, Ont. The rollout will expand throughout 2027 across the country, bringing dedicated shop-in-shop experiences to close to 300 Staples Canada stores. “We’re proud to help write the next chapter for a brand that has been part of childhood in Canada for generations,” said Staples Canada CEO Jens Cermak in a news release. “By bringing Toys”R”Us Canada and Parties”R”Us Canada into our national retail network, we’re creating an exciting new destination for Canadian families, with more choice, convenience and engaging experiences in store and online." This move is something Canadian retail stores have done before, notably Canadian Tire bringing in Party City and Hudson’s Bay with Zellers. “I think for Canadian Tire it has been successful because they brought in a Millennial shopper, a younger shopper, and that’s really helped their business, I think overall and got those shoppers into their ecosystem,” said retail analyst Bruce Winder. “For Hudson’s Bay, I think they were too far gone, unfortunately. I think they just didn’t have the traffic.” Dalhousie University marketing and retail specialist Dan Shaw said he’s not sure about this move. “It’s interesting. I think that we have seen examples of this working before, but there’s got to be some alignment,” Shaw said. “My worry is that do families see Staples as their go to? Is there enough overlap in terms of the audience? I mean, obviously Staples want to get a new audience from this. But I’m not sure it’s clear.” Winder sees a more optimistic potential for a win-win. “Toys”R”Us obviously has been reincarnated again by an ownership group out of the U.S., and this allows them to sort of get the brand out there at a much lower cost by cutting out a revenue sharing deal or some type of financial arrangement with Staples Canada,” he said. “I think it’s a plus for them. It gets them in a number of doors in a very quick fashion. For Staples it can be positive, too. You might be able to see Staples drive traffic to their stores this holiday.” Both note the space certain Staples have could lend to potential success. “Obviously, the issue with Toys”R”Us is they don’t have the money and they don’t have the footprint,” said Shaw. “So, these guys have footprint. They may have space that’s underutilized. It gives them a storefront, it gives them exposure.” “They might see this as either an add-on business just to get, you know, access some of their addressable market or they may also have a little bit extra space,” said Winder. “Let’s not forget that some of the boxes they have, the footprints are probably a little too big for what they need right now. This helps them fill the space with a new category that could bring in new customers.” Shaw is not so convinced the partnership can work. “I kind of like the idea of owning it rather than a partnership,” he said. “With a partnership, operationally how are things going to work? Whose systems are you going to use? Are we truly going to get intermixed from an operational and a logistics and a sourcing point of view, or is it going to create difficulty? Is it just a dying brand?” The biggest competitors for Staples right now are Amazon and Walmart. Both experts agree that’s not going to change in the toy game. “It’s hard to compete with Amazon or Walmart. You can’t match their prices,” said Shaw. “It’s hard to meet that scale. Amazon is massive. You’re not going to beat them on price. You’ve got to beat them on sort of customer intimacy and knowledge of the customer.” Because of these competitors, Winder believes they need to fall into the nostalgia of the brand to make it a success. “It’s really smart because we have a lot of legacy brands out there that were really popular with boomers and maybe even Gen Xers, but they may have lost a little bit of their affinity with younger groups like Gen Z and Millennials, and that’s been really the battle royale over the last decade or two,” said Winder. “Is finding a way to stay relevant with the boomers and Xers, but also introduce Millennials and Gen Z to some extent to their brands and try to bridge those generational gaps. “If you fail to do that, it’s really difficult to survive long term.”
