Suppliers struggle to keep up with toy craze (+video)

Demand for Gogo's Crazy Bones has been so great that parents have bought stores' entire stocks. Photo / Supplied

Throw them, swap them, collect them.

They're the latest craze in children's toys that suppliers are struggling to keep stock of and parents are struggling to get hold of.

Gogo's Crazy Bones are small, colourful characters that are based on knuckle bones and come in packs of three.

The aim is to put them into "battle", scoring the points needed to win, based on the way the figures land, while collecting the entire series.

Toyworld's domestic buyer Repeka Haurua said the toys had followed Australian and British trends and were the company's No 1 seller.

The toys were so popular they had been hard to find in some stores.

Ms Haurua said their appeal was that they were cheap - $6 for a pack of three - appealed to both boys and girls and were collectable.

Gogo Crazy Bones have been on sale since February.

"It's like a trading card game and it's a mystery," she said.

"You don't actually know what's in the bag. It's just a good, clean, honest trading game."

Toys R Fun Manukau store manager Anil Kumar said his company had also been inundated with requests for the toys.

The company's eight Auckland stores had just restocked after selling out.

Demand had been so great that sometimes parents had bought the store's entire stocks, he said.

"They come in packs of 30. Sometimes customers buy the whole pack."

Asked why he believed the toys were so popular, Mr Kumar said: "It's quite cheap. They only cost [from] $6 ... so it's not very expensive."

Nick Tuck, general manager of the leisure department at The Warehouse, said the toys were popular because of their price and collectability.

"It definitely is a good line for us at the moment - as it is internationally."

Veronica van der Straaten, principal of Mt Roskill Primary, had never heard of them because pupils were not allowed to bring toys to school.

But she said a quick inquiry in the school's Year Three and Four classroom revealed that most of the children had them at home.

"Many of them and their friends had them," Ms van der Straaten said.

"They're collectable-type things so you collect them and swap them with others."

There are thousands of YouTube videos devoted to Crazy Bones battles - the one below has over 100,000 views: