New York International Toy Fair is around the corner.

Toy Fair is coming!!!

The New York International Toy Fair is the once a year week-long menagerie of plastics, metal, cardboard, bling, and crowds of people with one thing on their minds, toys, toys, and more toys!

Walking into the Jacob Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan (as in New York City) you are overcome by the smell of toys. The smell is reminiscent of what I knew as a child as the smell of Christmas morning, new vinyl – you know that toxic nose tingling smell of new toys, yep, that’s it. This huge convention center is jam packed with three different levels of people presenting and selling new, classic, innovative, and envelope pushing toys. Without knowing, you may stroll right past the “hottest toy of the year”, that one toy that out sells all the others, which everyone wants, and makes a few people really rich – if they are lucky.

This year goHeidi has a mission at Toy Fair to find “Made in USA” toys to sell in our store and on our website. This may not be as easy as it sounds. In 2007, 60% of the US$71-billion global toy industry was produced in China. With 86% of the toys imported into the United States during 2007 being made in China, (http://www.asiapacificbusiness.ca/apbn/pdfs/bulletin292.pdf), the reality is most of the new toys being sold in the USA are made in China. It has not been easy finding a good variety of “Made in USA” toys, but our mission is to do so and bring them to our customers at goHeidi.com starting in the second quarter of the year.

goHeidi is confident our mission to bring our customers a good variety of Made in USA toys will be successful. Our confidence is being stoked by our visit last weekend to the New York International Gift Fair, also held at the Jacob Javits Center just three weeks before Toy Fair, where we found toy companies that are still making their toys in the USA. We will be revisiting these companies during Toy Fair to place orders for their Made in USA toys.

We can’t wait for Toy Fair.