Games, Playthings and Plush

Creating Entertaining Experiences (From page 154) their own in-store four-legged personal shopper. “My sisters and I bought the store in 2012. A few years after we took over, Wink came along. He’s a sheepadoodle [part Old English Sheepdog, part poodle] and has been our ‘shop dog’ for about seven years. He is loved by everybody. A lot of the time, he’ll go shopping with the customer.” Wink is so popular, Greene and her sisters launched the Wink Alliance, a nonprofit giving arm of their business, in which they select a nonprofit each year and support them through the sale of limited edition, co-branded collectibles (usually featuring Wink on the packaging).

Greene added their store always has “a great playlist going. I can’t take any credit for it—the staff makes these playlists and the customers often comment on them, but I think that helps create a really cool vibe. Our staff—and Wink—is really what makes our store so fun.”

Testing the products is one of the best parts of any toy store visit. However, nearly every toy retailer that normally had product boxes open had to put them away during COVID due to health concerns. “We normally have tons of them [product demos] and rotate them out,” Ruolo explained. “During COVID, a lot of our experiential stuff had to go into storage. We were able to bring it out with better sanitation procedures. During COVID, many things changed. Some of our stores were closed for months. We had very little experiential stuff for a long time—it started easing up around spring of this year. We had sanitation stations around the store, we had a lot of changes as far as the staff, such as taking temperatures, testing …there was a lot of stuff happening.”

Saldanha said they have only recently brought their demos back. “We have always been known as an experiential toy store, where lots of toys were open and