PicWicToys Brand Guidelines: Picwic, Toys “R” Us France & the 2022 Smyths Takeover

A toy superstore from the Lille suburbs.

PicWicToys was a French toy chain that traded under that name for less than four years. It was created in July 2019 by joining two older businesses: Picwic, a toy retailer from the Lille area, and the French arm of Toys “R” Us. After a court-supervised sale in 2022 its shops passed to the Irish retailer Smyths Toys, and the PicWicToys name has since come down from them.

The older half of the name came from the north of France. French Wikipedia, citing a 2013 history of the brand in the magazine La Saga des marques, says Stéphane Mulliez launched Picwic in 1977 in the Englos retail zone, on the western edge of Lille, after noticing that France had no large-format toy store. The same source traces a slow start: two stores opened at Roncq and Noyelles in 1981 and closed four years later, a shop on the Grand-Place in Lille traded until 1993, and the business then moved near the V2 shopping centre at Villeneuve-d’Ascq.

Growth came later. From 1997, French Wikipedia says, Picwic opened stores around Paris and in Beauvais, Rennes, Amiens, Dunkerque and Valenciennes, and in 2006 and 2008 it added two large stores of about 4,000 square metres, at Lomme and Barentin. Le Parisien reported its 24th store, at Sarcelles, in 2016, and Paris-Normandie its 25th, near Le Havre, in 2018. The company behind it was Luderix International; Le Journal des Entreprises named Romain Mulliez as its chairman in 2019.

By then the French toy trade was under strain. On 5 September 2018 France 3 Hauts-de-France reported that Picwic would close five of its stores, about a fifth of the network, as part of what the company called a transformation plan, in a market where Toys “R” Us and La Grande Récré were also in difficulty and online competition was growing. Picwic’s managing director told Les Echos, as quoted by France 3, that the answer lay in more in-store play demonstrations, workshops, a tighter product selection and more automatic collection lockers outside the stores.

Toys “R” Us France joins in.

The chance to grow came from the collapse of Toys “R” Us. On 8 October 2018 the commercial court at Évry chose an offer from Jellej Jouets for the French subsidiary of the American chain, according to French Wikipedia and France 3 Hauts-de-France; Jellej, controlled by the investment fund Cyrus Capital, took over the French stores and website. Luderix, Picwic’s parent, backed that offer and was associated with the takeover of the 43 Toys “R” Us stores, Le Journal des Entreprises reported in August 2019.

France’s competition authority cleared the combination of Jellej and Luderix on 19 April 2019, French Wikipedia says, and on 19 July 2019 the two businesses began trading as PicWicToys, a name made by running their two brands together. The new sign went up on the 43 former Toys “R” Us stores first and then on the 20 Picwic stores, and a single website replaced the two old ones. The Toy Book, the American trade magazine, later summed up the deal the same way: 20 Picwic stores and 43 French Toys “R” Us stores under one brand. With that change the Toys “R” Us name left French high streets and retail parks.

Le Journal des Entreprises described the launch in August 2019: a network of 63 stores with about 1,400 staff, an online catalogue of some 20,000 products, and a plan to refit the stores as places for craft workshops and birthday parties. The chain’s managing director called it, in a company statement quoted by the paper, “the marriage of two brands.”

The plan met hard years. On 2 June 2020, French Wikipedia says, citing the trade magazine LSA, PicWicToys announced a reorganisation that would close 23 of its 63 stores, a warehouse and one of its two head offices. The chain went into 2022 with 45 stores, the figure given by Le Journal des Entreprises and France 3 Hauts-de-France at the time of its sale.

Toy store chains and their signs.

Toy-shop chains in Europe, Latin America and Australia usually introduce themselves through a shop sign and a seasonal catalogue. Some of their names began as something else entirely: the Belgian chain DreamLand started as a neighbourhood supermarket called LIMA in Liedekerke in 1956 and turned to toys in 1978, according to Dutch Wikipedia. Logos, colour schemes and shop signs change over time, and each guide in this series describes the current sign only as the company itself shows it.

Store networks take several forms: high-street shops, large stores on retail parks, franchise branches and online shops. Branch, staff and country counts in these guides are given only with their source and date, because toy-shop networks grow and shrink through takeovers, rebrands, bankruptcies and closures, and a chain that has closed is described as closed.

A number of chains began as buying groups or associations of independent toy shops. Intertoys in the Netherlands grew out of a purchasing organisation that started buying toys in 1976, and NRC reported in October 2024 that about half of its shops were still run by franchisees. Where a name covers a network of independently owned shops rather than branches of one company, these guides say so plainly, and they describe owners, from retail groups and investors to founding families, as dated facts.

Chains also name their own ranges, catalogues and seasonal campaigns, such as the Intertoys Speelboek, published each September since 1987, and these guides name them only as the companies do. Corporate pages and company histories describe founders and owners; each guide sets out what can be checked against dated, independent sources, with any gap in the record stated plainly.

Receivership, Smyths and a new sign.

The end came quickly. PicWicToys, by then based at Lomme on the edge of Lille, was placed in receivership (redressement judiciaire) on 23 May 2022 by the commercial court in Lille, after debts built up during successive government-ordered shop closures, France 3 Hauts-de-France reported. On 5 July 2022 the court chose the offer of Smyths Toys, the Irish family-owned toy retailer, from several bidders. The offer covered 41 of the 45 stores and 632 of 763 jobs, according to France 3 and Le Journal des Entreprises; the president of the court told France 3 that Smyths had been preferred partly because it was a toy retailer that had already taken over Toys “R” Us stores in Austria and Germany. The Toy Book reported the same day that the four stores left out of the sale would close, and that PicWicToys had been owned in part by Cyrus Capital Partners.

The PicWicToys name did not survive the sale. In April 2023 Le Journal des Entreprises reported that Smyths was converting all 41 French stores it had bought to its own Smyths Toys sign, with the store at Bron, near Lyon, changing over from 1 April. French Wikipedia says the French company took the name Smyths Toys Fr in June 2022, is now wholly owned by Smyths, and that the PicWicToys sign was replaced for good in 2023. The stores trade today as Smyths Toys; PicWicToys no longer exists as a shop name.

As a brand, PicWicToys is a short record of a merger: one name built from two, carried on a few dozen big-box toy stores for less than four years, and then replaced by a third. Picwic’s own story — a toy superstore started in the Lille suburbs in 1977 — lasted far longer than the combined name.

For a design guide, PicWicToys shows how a merged name can join two shop signs into one, and how quickly a new owner can replace it. Compare Smyths Toys, which took over its stores, and Toys “R” Us, whose French stores it absorbed. For this guide we use a berry, a lagoon blue and a lemon yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PicWicToys’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.