Market Sizes

The best way that I've found to come up with this kind of data (without spending hundreds of dollars on reports from market research companies) is to look at the free executive summaries of these reports. For example, a Google search provided this site:

http://www.euromonitor.com/Toys_and_games_in_USA_(mmp)

This provides several nice nuggets of information. From these you can use some deductive reasoning to approximate additional information. For example, by using the stated annual industry growth rate and applying that to the industry size in 2003 you can get a rough approximation of the 2005 size. Or, use the fact that the top five US toy companies own about 40% of the market. Check out the 10K filings (annual reports) for these compnaies to see what their revenues are from sales. Add them up. This should be about 40% of the total market size for the US. After doing this a few times, you will get some numbers that provide a pretty good range that will be about as accurate as what you'd get if you bought one of those $1000 industry reports. Certainly good enough for a business plan.

Also, while you are looking at some toy and game company 10K reports, they may flat out tell you what they believe the market size is, or what their market share is. Since the big boys often do buy those $1000 reports (or spend a bunch of money to come up with their own numbers), let them do your research for you.

Bill