Company Profile
Geemac
Geemac the complete package Late in 2020, Geemac completed the move to its new offices and extensive warehouse facility in Northampton. Predominantly an FOB supplier since its inception 18 years ago, in 2003, the move means the company can now start supplying its products domestically – a major boon for both Geemac and its customers. Toy World spoke to Gerald McKay, managing director, and Adam Pearson, sales director, about how Covid affected the outdoor market, and how its new premises will benefit retailers and consumers alike. say the year was a tough one for Geemac; quite the opposite, in fact.
Gerald McKay
Adam Pearson
s a company, Geemac is not one to brag, instead preferring to operate quietly under the radar. So quietly, in fact, MD Gerald McKay required some gentle persuasion from the Toy World team to take part in this interview. And for a company with so much good news to share, from its extraordinary performance in 2020 to its new virtual showroom setup, its reluctance to big
itself up places Geemac firmly in Camp Humble.
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Gerald starts off by noting that 2020 was a strange year, an observation very few (if any at all) would disagree with. Despite having been in the outdoor products business for 26 years, and therefore believing he knew it inside and out, Gerald says the pandemic, and the behaviours and trends that resulted from it, have been both unpredictable and unfathomable. But that’s not to
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“The weather in March, and the national lockdown, was the perfect combination of factors for the Outdoor category,” Gerald tells Toy World. “The extremely warm weather we saw in March wasn’t something we’d usually be enjoying that time of year, and the summer that followed, despite not being the hottest, was long and dry. As a result, our biggest issue was the volume of repeat orders we were receiving from our retailers. We’ve never seen anything like it. Our factories were querying how we wanted to play the situation; if the bottom fell out of the market due to a sudden change in the weather or lifting of lockdown, we’d have potentially been left with the stock until January or February this year. The question we faced was whether we’d be better off waiting until budgets had been spent and stock had been sold out, or whether we should go again. In the end we were supplying and bringing in new orders right up until the beginning of July.” At that point, Geemac had taken in domestic stock to support a new customer, and there was balance stock in the warehouse which they listed on Amazon, a channel it usually keeps to a minimum to avoid causing difficulties for its retail customers. However, the beginning of September