Green toys and eco toys climb on the back of Fairtrade sales

News is that the recession has bitten a large chunk out of sales of Organic products with the value of organic products declining from £2.11bn in 2008 to £1.73bn in 2010

In direct comparison sales of Fairtrade products were up by 40% and broke the £1bn for the first time

As a fair trade wholesaler we are very interested in sales information of organic and fairtrade products especially as our fair trade toys are selling so well

We were therefore very interested to see that over 72% of sales of organic products were through the supermarkets and that sales in supermarkets had reduced by 7.7% as against just 5% overall. We thought that perhaps supermarkets themselves worried about the price of organic products and were consciously or unconsciously scaling down the impact and visibility of their organic products

That was until we saw that Sainsbury's account for 25% of all fairtrade sales in the UK and the Co-op is making a concerted effort to catch them up, which blew that theory apart!

The final piece of news which interested us this week is that while H+M announced a fall in profits of 11% in the last quarter of 2010 Stylecompare.co.uk have predicted sales of so called disposable fashion will fall and sales of eco fashion will continue to increase.

So what does this all mean to a fairtrade wholesaler of stuffed toys and their wonderful Independent customers? We are hoping that it means that the British consumer understands the value behind buying fairtrade and that they are finally moving away from buying cheap but poor quality in to more classic, value for money items. To get on my band wagon again it is simply not right that you can buy a dress so cheaply that you can wear it for one night only and then throw it away because the quality is so poor. Much better that you invest in quality items which have been made well and with care.

Certainly we have seen our sales increase in 2011 as retailers repeat purchase best selling items such as our knitted T Rex and crochet Octopus. We will definitely continue to develop new crochet and knitted toys at affordable prices, and we are always looking to partner with more fair trade producers.

It would be nice to think that the Xmas no1 toy will be a hand made, fair trade cotton crochet Humpty Dumpty rather than the farting, burping Dave the funky monkey who was so successful in 2010. That would almost (but not quite) have made the recession worth it!