Pretty Sticky

Specialty retailers will have lots more to choose from next year thanks to Mrs. Grossman’s Paper Co., which is expanding its offerings to include sticker-based travel games and deluxe activity sets. The 28-year-old, ecologically friendly manufacturer—which makes its products in Petaluma, Calif.—has always had at least a limited presence in toy stores, and is now appealing directly to these buyers with even more kid-friendly lines.

“Andrea [Grossman] basically started the concept of stickers, and our roots are serving the children’s market,” Susan Eslick, the company’s new creative director, tells Playthings. And though the company’s products are equally loved by scrapbooking enthusiasts, “we’ve been focusing on developing a bigger selection of kids’ offerings,” she says. “I’ve been with the company for about a year and a half, and I suppose my real interests are with kids’ products.” The company is also expanding its toy representation, Eslick says. “The more products that we have to offer our reps in this category, the better. It just builds on itself.”

The new $9.99 items, launching at Toy Fair in February, include Sticker Bingo-To-Go, a three game set in a case with reusable stickers for ages 5 and up, and four themed Stickerific Activity Packs, which pair a set of more than 100 stickers with a 48-page activity book filled with puzzles, word games, coloring pages, mazes and brain teasers for ages 4 and up. Pirate Cove, Under the Sea, Bugs & Bees and Fairy Garden comprise the initial Stickerific assortment.

The new products are designed “to really encourage the use of stickers” and to “engage a child with play and learning at the same time,” Eslick says. “We always try for lively, unique art, colorful, fun. It’s really providing learning as fun. For a very young child, lifting a sticker off a sheet is developmentally a foundation for math down the road. A child gets an enormous amount of pleasure just from that simple act, and then there’s the delight older kids have [too].”

The company developed the lines after similar activity sets—like its paper dolls and “create-your-own” kits, which both feature reusable stickers—were a hit last year. These lines will also expand in 2008 with the Paper Doll Girlfriends Pack (featuring five doll-and-sticker sheets) and a Create-Your-Own Adventures Pack (featuring five themed sheets of stickers: pirate, dragon, tractor, dinosaur and spaceship). Both packs include a double-sided play board.

These travel-friendly elements make the new products an ideal fit not only for toy stores but for new aisles or departments in the gift, book, stationery and car wash shops where Mrs. Grossman’s already distributes, Eslick says. It may even attract mass retailers. “We, of course, want to sell where people shop, and we think stickers can be sold in a multitude of areas. So we can cast a wide net.”