REVENUE DRIVEN FOR OUR CLIENTS
$500 million and countingIn this Wytpod episode, host Stephen Bland interviews Annamarie von Firley, president of Adventuretown Toy Emporium. Annamarie shares her unique journey from being a fashion designer to creating a child development platform offering custom toy boxes tailored to each child’s developmental needs. She discusses the company’s personalised approach, their success at virtual expos, and plans for groundbreaking technology in developmental assessment. Annamarie also offers advice for entrepreneurs looking to start new ventures.
Adventuretown Toy Emporium offers custom child development toy boxes tailored to each child’s developmental profile, providing play-based learning and milestone tracking.
Hello everyone, welcome to our latest Wytpod. I’m Stephen Bland, your host with Wytlabs, a full service marketing agency. Today’s guest is Annamarie. Annamarie, feel free to introduce yourself and let our viewers know about your background.
I’m Annamarie von Firley, the president of Adventuretown Toy Emporium. I have a really interesting and unique background. I have a degree in wooden toy design and construction, a second degree in furniture design. I accidentally became a fashion designer for 20 years. And then I decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore. And I wanted to go back to toys, but I didn’t want to like be a manufacturer because I did that for 20 years. So I created a toy store with a successful IndieGoGo campaign in 2016. And then COVID decided that our bricks and mortar dreams would not be materialising, so we had to pivot.
Awesome, awesome. Who is the ideal target audience for the brand?
Well, our Pivot is an app that we created for parents of children zero to three years old. It is a child development app to help parents optimise their child’s development through play-based exercises, milestone tracking, resource library, and customised subscription box. So we are looking for parents who have mostly first-time parents, but not always first-time parents, who just feel like they want more information about their child’s development and really want the tools to really help put their child on the best path.
Awesome. What makes you different than your competitors?
Well, there are other subscription boxes and there’s also other child development boxes, but we are the only one that customizes each box to each child’s unique developmental needs, whether they’re delayed, on track, advanced or asynchronous. So we create a developmental profile based on parent provided data, such as their birth date, whether or not they’re born prematurely, what milestones they achieved when they achieve them, what exercises they’ve mastered, and then also feedback on the toys that we’ve sent the parents.
And we take all that and we crunch all those numbers and then we look for lags or acceleration and then we select hand select toys for each box to help that child get to the next stage of development.
So all of it is custom. All of them?
Yeah, it’s customised. Yeah. Other competitors, like every kid gets the same box of stuff and they don’t really know anything about what your child is, where they are developmentally. And so we are the only ones that really tailor every box to every child’s unique developmental needs.
That is awesome. I have a two and a half year old and same thing happened, just bought a random box and it really, you know, rarely ever uses it. What are your best selling products?
Yeah.
So for Fletch Things Flight, so we have three different levels. So all the PlayBase exercises are free. There’s over 4,280 of them. And then we have milestone tracking that you can add on to a basic membership. But our most popular one is obviously the premium, which is the customised boxes. Just because like you want, when you go out to buy, developmental toys, oftentimes parents don’t know what to do with them. So you get this toy and you open the box and you stick it in front of your kid. But it turns out there’s like 50 different exercises that you can do that can specifically help develop specific needs or develop skills. That’s the word I’m looking for. By playing with the toy in a specific way. So,for instance, everybody’s had those little banging toys where it’s the balls with a hammer and they fall through a hole after they whack them a couple of times.
Well, there’s other things that you can do as well because the circle that the balls go into, they’re usually the same colour. So you can do colour matching. So can you put the red ball in the red hole, which also associates the colour red with the word red. So it’s also language development. And you also have the eye-hand coordination of picking up the ball and putting it back in the gross motor school of skills of whacking the ball. And then also saying something like when they’re a little bit older and they played with it for a little bit longer is to sort of test their understanding about which ball, like can you put the blue ball in the red hole, which is a whole different my cognitive development.
So we have sourced over 3,200 tours from 30 countries. It’s the best the world has to offer, are able to put the newest, most exciting toys, the most developmentally appropriate toys in our boxes. Every our competitors manufacture their own toys, so they’re not changing anything. And so Yeah, so we have this ability to pivot on a dime and introduce new things, come up with exercises with experts to help child children develop their skills.
Awesome, that is amazing. What is the future plan for yourself and the brand?
Well, we are in the process of getting an NSF grant to help create groundbreaking technology for our app, which I can’t tell too much about, but it is something that doesn’t exist. It’s a technology that currently doesn’t exist that may revolutionise developmental assessment.
That’s awesome. Let’s keep it a secret. I’m just kidding. What activities have you done that’s been the most successful to promote the brand so far marketing wise?
So our largest lead generator are pregnancy expos and we have done live and in-person ones, they, I’m sorry, virtual and in-person ones. And it’s actually the virtual ones that we do the best at. We have a captive audience from all over the country and sometimes Canada. And, you know, it’s a lot of talking. I do for like 11 hours a day, but we do giveaways.
Okay.
I do live app demos, I demonstrate exercises, I talk about milestones, primitive reflexes, answer questions, do Q &A with people who receive the boxes so that pregnant people can ask some questions about their experience. We onboard tons of people during these expos, and then at the end we also get a lead list or the list of all the people who have attended, and then we’re able to add them to our database for newsletter cascades and we can pinpoint the information we’re delivering to them precisely. We know either their child’s due date or the child’s birth date so we can give them the right information at the right time. So we set up newsletter cascades to start at 27 weeks of pregnancy all the way up to 36 months.
There’s anywhere from two to five newsletters for each one and they’re all about educating parents about milestones that are upcoming and other tangentially related things like how to introduce first foods, how to wean off of pacifiers, printable lists about what you need for your nursery or what you need to take when you’re giving birth in a hospital versus a birthing centre. And it’s a really great way to not only inform people but also to onboard them onto the platform if they did not come to our booth during the virtual expos.
Awesome. I feel like I could have used some of that information. Most of our listeners are entrepreneurs like yourself. What challenges have you faced in the past few years and how were you able to overcome them?
Yeah
Oh gosh. Well, it’s been a wild ride, right? With COVID really sort of disrupting everything. So, you know, at least I had enough traction before COVID happened that, and I had enough user base with the toy store that I was able to do this pivot. I think now’s a fantastic time to start a business just because it’s kind of like,
And I’m gonna say this is gonna sound terrible, but there’s a lot more opportunities now for different types of businesses to be started just because so many of them did not make it through COVID, right? So for instance, in Los Angeles, five toy stores closed during COVID. That means there’s like four left in Los Angeles. So now’s a really awkward, great time to like open a toy store because they just don’t exist. And I’m sure that’s true for many different industries.
100%. Well, speaking of starting a new business, what advice could you give an entrepreneur that is looking to start a new brand this year or next year?
man, well, I’ve done it a couple different ways. With my fashion business, I did it the old school way. But with Adventure Town, I did it through crowdfunding. And the nice thing about that is that you build interest. It helps if you have a larger network that you can reach out to and not start from zero. But if you have, if you’re older, like me and you’ve been around for a while, like you know some people, right? So you can call in those favours when you’re doing your raise. But what’s nice about that, and it’s not necessarily equity crowdfunding I’m recommending, but like getting every day your future customers to get on board with your idea. And they’re gonna be your backers, they’re gonna be your champions, they’re gonna be the ones that are going to have your back because they know you and they support you and they believe in your mission.
100%. Annamarie, is there anything that I haven’t asked you? You would want our listeners to know about yourself and the brand?
Hmm, I don’t know about that. I think you covered just about everything.
Awesome, well, and I really appreciate you coming on the Wytpod and sharing your story and your journey and your brand. Thank you so much.
You’re welcome.
Thank you.
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