Hobbies Trix Supplement

Launched in 1932, the Hobbies Trix Supplement was a regular set of pages in Hobbies Weekly magazine, designed to promote the Trix metal construction system ... presumably in the hope of filling part of the gap between Trix and Meccano. Meccano had the benefit of a well, established popular magazine, Meccano Magazine, which featured encylopedia-style articles on a range of subjects that would be of interest to anyone curious about engineering, coving ships, boats, railways, aircraft and heavy civil engineering. While Trix had no hope of throwing together a serious alternative to Meccano Magazine themselves, their agreement with Hobbies let them piggy-back their pages on another poplar magazine with an existing reach to people interested in building toys at home.

While the marketing match was not perfect (Hobbies Magazine readers tended to be more into making permanent objects, usually out of wood) the Hobbies Trix Supplement did at least guarantee that a body of people would end up reading about the system and thinking about it ... and hopefully buying it for their children, or mentioning it to friends.

As well as introducing readers to Trix, the Supplement featured special offers, competitions, and features on Trix models built by readers.

Hobbies and Bassett-Lowke Ltd.

The Hobbies Trix Supplement seems to have been a Bassett-Lowke Ltd initiative, as the Hobbies magazine took a number of large Bassett-Lowke adverts during this period, and B-L also seem to have been able to use the Hobbies magazine to run articles praising their new range of Nuways dollhouse furniture. This advertising and promotion seems to have started when the HTS first appeared, and finished at around the same time that the HTS ceased.

The use of Hobbies magazine to (briefly) promote the relatively new Nuways dollhouse furniture range may have seemed especially useful to B-L, since the magazine did reach significant numbers of people interested in building wooden dollhouses, and who would then presumably have needed to furnish them, and B-L were now releasing the second wave of the Nuways range, in its second year. However, the range was short-lived, and the failure of Nuways sales to take off sufficiently may have been another factor in the ending of the Hobbies Trix Supplement (in addition to running out of material to publish about a system that promoted the limited number of different pieces as a selling-point).