This Retailer’s Lifeblood Was Cheap Plastic Toys. Now It Wants to Switch to Wood.

This Christmas season, shoppers in the Danish capital could see the change in approach, with new wooden versions of chess, backgammon and four-in-a-row on sale in stores alongside older plastic versions of the same games.

The two versions won’t coexist for long. “There’s no scenario where this product is in the stores in about a year,” said

Martin Jermiin,

Flying Tiger Copenhagen’s chief executive, referring to the plastic edition of four-in-a-row.

Flying Tiger Copenhagen, which is owned by holding company Zebra A/S and operates nearly 900 stores worldwide, aims to halve its use of plastic by 2025, relative to 2019, among other sustainability goals. That is a tough target for a company that has relied heavily on the synthetic material, Mr. Jermiin said.

“Plastic is a very, very good material,” he said. “It’s just not very good for the planet.”

Reducing use of plastic, and thereby plastic-related waste and emissions, has become an environmental goal for many companies, including Lego A/S, which is developing ways to make its toy bricks out of recycled or plant-based plastics. Around 500 major global companies have signed a United Nations-backed pledge to stop using new, virgin plastic in their packaging by 2025.

Cheap, versatile and universal, plastic is hard for companies such as Flying Tiger to phase out quickly, however.

Inside one of the product development studios at Flying Tiger’s headquarters, an array of plastic skeletons, spiders and other ghoulish trinkets that will form next year’s Halloween range highlighted the scale of the challenge. The holiday is a big earner for Flying Tiger, which doubled its Halloween product sales this year, and expects to do so again in 2023, according to Mr. Jermiin.

But the holiday remains heavily dependent on plastic from a product standpoint: Until recently, Flying Tiger’s Halloween range was almost entirely made of plastic.

The company’s answer has been to ditch plastic where it can: products such as jewelry and ornaments can be made from metal, glass or ceramic instead. And where it can’t, as with molded ghosts and skeletons, it will use recycled plastic instead of virgin material.

That presents another obstacle for a company whose appeal rests in part on its low prices. While consumers have been flocking to budget retailers in recent months as high energy bills and other inflationary pressures squeeze their disposable incomes, many shoppers are unwilling or unable to pay more, making it harder for retailers to recoup the higher costs they face themselves.

Designers Christian Ramso and Lovorika Banovic at Flying Tiger Copenhagen, which now is making its traditionally plastic games and toys out of wood as well.

Flying Tiger has raised some prices, but has focused mainly on controlling costs at the design phase, said Mr. Jermiin, as materials of all kinds grow more expensive. The rising cost of ceramics, for example, led to updated versions of products that were slightly smaller but priced the same.

Shifting away from virgin plastic also comes with a cost. Recycled plastic on the Chinese market, where Flying Tiger outsources much of its production, is currently around 25% more expensive than virgin plastic, for example, while other plastic substitutes, notably wood, may also cost more. 

Still, materials are only one part of a product’s overall cost, so even when the company opts for costlier materials, “We’re not sacrificing a lot,” Mr. Jermiin said. “Sustainability shouldn’t be an excuse to price higher.”

Flying Tiger designs its products in-house and sets the order volume of each item, meaning it can tweak designs and order sizes to have some control over costs during times of rampant inflation.

Replacing plastic with wood can be done affordably, the company says. A wooden toy banjo priced at 12 euros—equivalent to roughly $12.75—has recently replaced a plastic version that cost €15. At €2.50, a wooden toy truck is 50 cents cheaper than its plastic predecessor.

For now, the new wooden version of four-in-a-row costs €5—double the price of the plastic set. But the plastic set was ordered in large quantities, whereas the company ordered a relatively low volume of the wooden version to test its popularity with Christmas shoppers, Mr. Jermiin said. If it proves a hit, a wooden set ordered in high volume would become significantly cheaper per unit, he said.

The switch-over is also under way in other product categories. Wet wipes, previously synthetic, are now made of bamboo. Mint sweets come in metal tins without the plastic parts included in earlier iterations. The use of synthetic fibers in textile products is declining.

The shift away from plastic is a big positive for some consumers and, so long as prices remain stable, it doesn’t seem to deter others who are less environmentally minded, Mr. Jermiin said. In the run-up to Christmas, stores have been packed with shoppers and “basket sizes are up,” he said.

Write to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com