At Toy Fair, we had the opportunity to provide a video demonstration to TDmonthly Magazine.
While Steve served as the video personality this year, Janet promises to be in front of the camera next year.
Click the screenshot below to launch the video in a new window:
How many different ways can Caboodle! Toys be misspelled?
Our company name is prone to spelling mistakes.
Here is a running list of the wrong ways our name has been spelled:
At the Toy Fair, we had an opportunity to introduce our Noah’s Pals animal figures to Chris Byrne (“The Toy Guy“), a top toy industry expert. Just after Toy Fair wrapped up, Chris added a great post on our collectible line on his new and excellent blog.
Our favorite paragraphs:
One line we found at Toy Fair truly blew us away. It’s called Noah’s Pals, and they’re made by a company here in New York. What makes this company distinct is that it’s not just allowing kids to act out the Biblical legend of Noah, the company has married kids’ fascination with animals, their love of factual information and a passion for collecting.
The result is an initial group of 40 pairs of animals, a beautiful ark and human characters. Each of the animals comes with information about them–how common they are, whether they’re endangered and their habitats. The sculpting on the animals is absolutely gorgeous, and (We love this.) the male and female animals are different in scale and structure. Plus, the more endangered the animal is, the more limited the edition, which adds to collectibility. This is smart, fun stuff.
Read the whole entry. Thanks Chris!
Toy Fair is now over and it’s time for us to get some rest. Our throats our sore from many great conversations with retailers from all across the United States and the world. We’ll resume blogging soon with a closer look at endangered and vulnerable animals.
In the interim, you can tackle our Word Search puzzle containing all forty animals in the first series of Noah’s Pals. Click on the picture below to launch a one-page PDF for easy printing:
The good weather has come to an end — if only the snow would have waited one more day!
While last days are known for being slow, we met many more toy store owners from different corners of the US, from Alaska to California to Louisiana. And we met some international buyers too from Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and even from New Zealand.
To better market Noah’s Pals at Toy Fair, we invested in a “showcase display” on the North Concourse of the Javits Center. We wanted to make sure that everyone would see our line of animal figures in case they somehow were not able to make it to our aisle. We heard from many people that the display gained a lot of attention. We hope that buyers noticed and that our competitors didn’t copy our unique ideas! (And if they do, it’s a great thing that Janet is an intellectual property attorney!)
It’s Monday and it somehow feels like Thursday!
We worked throughout last week to set up our booth and working all day on Sunday has rewired our internal calendars. The foot traffic was excellent again and we’ve received great feedback on the line.
“I love that they come in pairs!”
“You’re the only company that makes all of the animals to scale, right?” (“Right!”)
“They are adorable! They look so real!”
“The ID Cards are very cool. Smart idea.”
“Great website!”
Below are picturs of our 200 square foot home for four days — Booth 1633-O.
At last, after many months of development, it’s time for the formal debut of Noah’s Pals at Toy Fair!
The biggest toy trade show in the US brings lots of toy people together under one roof at New York City’s Javits Center. Aisles and aisles of action figures, dolls, games, puzzles, bicycles, puppets, plush and more compete for attention among the buyers. In this case, the buyers are not kids but adults — many of the top specialty toy store owners in the country and representatives from the bigger chains as well.
Day 1 of Toy Fair brought good weather. Last year everybody needed to fight their way through nearly 27 inches of snow. This year, we just had to fight through 27 degrees of cold. And the turnout was great. The buyers were lined up for the 10AM start and foot traffic was steady throughout the day.
After many months of getting our product ready, it quickly became time to get our business ready. We needed to begin the sales & marketing and let the many great retail establishments know all about Noah’s Pals and Caboodle! Toys. At the end of 2006, we sent initial samples to many great retailers to let them know that we want to be a part of their 2007 plans. We also created deals with wonderful sales representatives across the US so that they can introduce Noah’s Pals to their retail relationships.
But the biggest component of our launch is Toy Fair, which starts tomorrow. There are approximately 200 new exhibitors that come to Toy Fair every year. Some of those have been in the business for quite some time and have made the decision to include exhibiting as part of their marketing plan. Some of the other new manufacturers are exhibitors or service providers to the toy industry.
My back-of-the-envelope guess is that there are about 50 to 100 genuinely new companies that debut their toy products every year. We’re excited to be one of the new companies and we look forward to providing you with quick reports of our exhibiting adventures.
An important part of Noah’s Pals is our website — www.noahspals.com. When we looked at the landscape of other toy sites, we noticed that most sites were uninformative and poorly designed. We decided that our website would support our product and broaden the experience for consumers. Most importantly, we want the animals to be the stars of the site. Each animal pair in Noah’s Pals has its own ‘profile page’ with information on its conversation status, habitat, home, and much, much more.
Building the site took a lot of our time. From the very start, we developed a ’storyboard’ of the website to get a better sense of what we needed to do through all parts of our business. We then worked with a web designer to get an overall look for the site. We worked with other graphic designers to create the different illustrations and images located throughout the site. And then we worked closely with a web developer that put the coding and databases into place so we could launch the site in time.
While we are happy with the site, it is important to note that it is a work-in-progress. For example, we have a great Noah’s Ark game that you can access from our site — and we want to add more games soon. We also have a great coloring book that you can download, and we hope to add more content here too. We’ll add these features and more as we grow the business. Of course, we’d love to have your feedback on what’s good and what’s bad. Please contact us with your suggestions.
