your #FAOMemories will be assimilated image: fao.com
My kids could be in college and writing papers about surviving the trauma of their dad exploiting their childhoods on a dadblog designed to make the money to pay for their college, and I will still be sitting here, adding new chutes and ladders to the convoluted history of people buying, failing, bankrupting, and selling FAO Schwarz.
Toys R Us bought FAO Schwarz in 2009, and after closing the last/only retail location on Fifth Avenue last year, has sold the zombie brand to the brand's fifteenth owner, ThreeSixty Group, of Kowloon and Irvine. ThreeSixty is a privately held, vertically integrated ideation, design, manufacturing, licensing, and distribution company that literally used to be called MerchSource? Am I getting this right? My research on ThreeSixty is not turning up much at all. They seem to have the toy license for the Discovery Communications brands, though, so that's something.
But if you notice FAO Schwarz brand toys in a big box retailer someday, then I guess their undisclosed purchase price will have been worth it. Because now that the below-market retail leases are gone, the entire value of FAO Schwarz derives from the fact that you've heard of it.
Toys "R" Us sells FAO Schwarz to ThreeSixty Group [kidscreen]
Previously, deeply related: FAO R Us: a compleat history of all the people and companies who've bought and sold FAO Schwarz [To their credit, the Schwarz family did hold onto it for the first 101 years.]
