Company Profile
Get crafty Craft Buddy founders Dino and Gary Wadhwani chat to Toy World’s assistant editor Sam Giltrow about the meteoric rise of their hero product Crystal Art, new licences and gaining a firmer foothold in the UK toy sector.
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itting in the offices of arts and crafts company Craft Buddy, it’s hard to imagine that just 10 years ago, Dino and Gary were doing business from a shed in their parents’ garden. The rise of the company from humble beginnings is something of which the brothers are incredibly proud, along with the fact that they have followed in the footsteps of their father, who set up his own arts and crafts concern in the 1990s, supplying products to schools. Dino explains: “As teenagers, we would always be involved in our father’s business somehow, whether we were attending retail or trade fairs with him or helping in the warehouse – that was how we spent our summers and our holidays.” As the boys grew older, Gary went into a consulting career while Dino, just prior to starting university, spent his gap year working full-time in his father’s business, learning the trade and networking with arts and crafts buyers. Gary went on to work in Amsterdam for five years with a large Dutch retail group in a buying and sourcing capacity, during which time he visited manufacturing hubs like China, Vietnam and Indonesia several times each year. Although their father had been importing his products from Indianbased wholesalers, Gary began to see that the major emerging manufacturing hub was the Far East. It was this experience that sowed the seeds for the brothers eventually launching their own business in 2010 . That year, while both still working in other full-time jobs, they undertook their first sourcing trip together, visiting China and finding factories to supply arts and crafts items which Dino had identified were not yet
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