Worldly Delights

It all begins with a dream…

Unlike many of the playthings that are the result of focus group studies or market research, toys that make up the multicultural genre often stem from personal visions. Whether product designers are filling marketplace voids or marketing executive parents are aiming to recreate their own children's experiences for others, toy makers—many of which are new to the field—are helping put a more colorful face on dolls and games.

For Jennifer Toussaint-Cali bringing a line of ethnic dolls to market was both personal and professional. The president of New York-based Vannuzza LLC remembers her sister's decision to purchase a blonde haired, blue-eyed doll for her then 5-year-old daughter. “My niece, who was always bubbly and chatty, suddenly became sad and cried for no apparent reason,” she tells Playthings. “She said, 'Mommy, why am I not pretty? Everyone says my doll is so pretty, but she does not look like me.' My sister was shocked and sad; she had to spend a lot of time reassuring her daughter.”

To determine whether her niece's sentiments were shared, Cali surveyed girls ages 3-13 and learned that they wanted an “angel/best friend doll who looks just like them because they all believed in angels.” To Cali, this meant designing a doll more reflective of today's ethnically diverse population, but also offering young girls something more. “I wanted to emphasize the importance of friendship and the beauty of cultural diversity,” she explains. “I wanted to bring out a play doll that will dare girls to acknowledge and celebrate their self-worthiness.”

And her line of Vanange dolls—outfitted in angelic white and trimmed with vibrant colors—aim to do just that. Each doll hails from a different location across the world and is paired with a book that chronicles the background of her native land's culture and history.

Getting the dolls to market was not without its challenges. It took Cali more than a year to find the right factory and sculptor, and after an arduous search, she finally went with Cynthia Woodie of New York. “With great precision, she interpreted the design and allowed by dolls to look life-life,” she says.

Such determination was worth the effort: The Vanange dolls received a tremendous buyer reception at this year's Toy Fair. “Their features are so realistic many visitors asked whether they were collectibles or play dolls,” says Cali. “Even people who were not buyers stopped at our booth and asked if they could touch them.” Among the designs that garnered the most attention were the Vannah doll from Seychelles, featuring semi-textured hair that can be combed and braided, and the Bella doll, a multi-ethnic girl who lives on New York City's Roosevelt Island.

“Let's face it: the globe is becoming smaller—why not incorporate that in children's play?” asks Cali.

Much like Cali's desire to expand young girls' cultural horizons, Kristi Necochea sought to reproduce a more realistic picture of today's diverse population. Her collection of six play dolls who are Hispanic, Caucasian, bi-racial and Asian—dubbed the Friends Forever Girls—is reflective of the multicultural network of students mirrored in her daughter's classroom. Necochea believes her line has found a place with moms and their daughters because “parents are attracted to the idea of exploring friendships and girls are attracted to the dolls themselves.” She tells Playthings, “The Friends Forever Girls provides them with a tool that promotes character building, self-respect and the rewards of being a good friend…all while being really fun to play with.” Each doll is packaged with a hardcover book, entitled “The First Day of Forever,” along with an accessory.

While the line is being marketed to children, Necochea also aims her product at those with purchasing power—parents, grandparents and teachers. As a small business owner, she has bypassed traditional advertising vehicles and instead spoken directly to consumers about the positive message behind these dolls.

“What has surprised me most is that Friends Forever Girls have been available only a short time and the feedback has been amazing,” she enthuses. One of her earliest customers was a 92-year-old great-grandmother who asked her caregiver to bring her to a book signing for her 8-year-old great-granddaughter. Customers range from grandfathers who have personally thanked her for a wonderful gift idea, to the young girls who come up to her at book signings to tell her about their favorite doll.

“Most often, it's not the doll who looks most like them, but the one who has similar personality traits and similar interests,” she reveals. “It confirms what I thought: that children are color-blind. They see what's on the inside; I love that.”

Richard Rawson's adopted daughter from China was the inspiration for JamboKids of Great Falls, Va., makers of plush dolls and storybook gift sets. “The experience [with out daughter] prompted us to confront the need for product that addressed character development for multicultural children,” he tells Playthings.

Rawson points to statistics from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Census Bureau, citing more than 45 percent of U.S. children under the age of 5 are part of a racial minority. “The unique identity issues, social and emotional experiences and other developmental challenges faced by these children make an impact on their learning and self-image,” he notes.

The ability to communicate all of this posed a unique challenge for Rawson, who admits having to pare down the number of ideas “that could produce a laser beam-like focus on this need.” Instead, JamboKids sought to offer affordable, culturally diverse role models for ages 3 to 8 that promote universal values. “Our products are designed to teach young children to appreciate the differences they may encounter in our own culture, while building the strength of character that will help meet life's challenges in a global world,” he explains.

JamboKids plush dolls represent a range of world cultures—Asian, African, Hispanic, North American and Russian—and are constructed with a soft fabric that Rawson describes as “huggable…just right for ages 3 and up.” Not only do these gift sets give caregivers an excuse to cuddle up with their child, they help stimulate an interest in reading, build attention span and boost a child's curiosity and imagination.

Similar to Friends Forever Girls, JamboKids is targeting parents and grandparents. It's offering a free download of the e-book A Parent's Guide to Promoting Positive Character Growth—Helpful Tips, Discussion Prompts and Activities to Enhance Your Child's Positive Character Development on JamboKids.com.

Rawson is delighted by the reaction he has received from both buyers and consumers. “Many vendors had tears in their eyes when we told them how our daughter had to overcome her shyness and deal with the fact that she looked different from her parents,” he says, also noting the comments he has received from families of different ethnicities who can appreciate that real children served as models for the dolls' faces.

Once young girls have outgrown the Spanish-speaking explorer who has taken the preschool world by storm, they are often left without an equal, more mature counterpart. Those tweens girls who turn to fashion dolls for role-playing are hard-pressed to find one that embodies a true ethnic look and feel—or so were the feelings of Martha Barbosa, chief creative officer/designer of Hip-Spanic.

At Toy Fair last year, she noticed an obvious lack in Hispanic fashion dolls for the mass market. “The Hispanic buying power has the largest growth rate, and we viewed this as a perfect time to develop a line of Hispanic dolls and playsets,” Barbosa tells Playthings.

However, being new to the toy manufacturing community, Hip-Spanic experienced some initial setbacks, especially when hiring vendors that did not adhere to its expectations and timelines. The company then decided to develop product internally where better quality control was possible. The result was four dolls and themed playsets, all of which include make-up and T-shirt iron-ons, and will be available in the fourth quarter.

While product is being targeted specifically at kids ages 6 and up, Barbosa believes Hispanic children will best identify with the dolls as a role model. However, she adds, “we are confident that the overall play value of our line will cross over to other ethnicities, as most children have a friend who is Hispanic.”

To help promote the brand, the company is introducing its Honor Roll Doll via a Web site-based contest that encourages children to send in their report cards. At the end of the school year, Hip-Spanic will reward the child with the highest GPA by sculpting a doll in his or her likeness.

As a child growing up in a multicultural household, Stacy George knew firsthand the struggles of being different. “I was constantly trying to help others understand my family's culture and the impact multiculturalism has on the way people live,” she tells Playthings. As she grew older, she began traveling the globe to learn how she could effectively communicate this message. The result was the development of her Seattle-based company, Around the World, and a board game by the same name that she describes as “a platform for the learning to begin and continue as the world becomes more global.”

Because making education fun is no easy task, the CEO battled against the misnomer that a product with a social value component was not sellable. Finding distributors and sales reps that feel her game fits within the traditional definition of a toy also posed a challenge.

Nevertheless, George has found success by marketing Around the World direct to the consumer, through schools, home schooling groups and parents. Her sales pitch involves visiting schools and playing the game with students, displaying product at school events and selling via the company Web site (aroundtheworldgames.com), offering discounts to teachers and other groups. “We're beginning to identify a business-to-business approach to work with more distributors who can help get product out on a bigger scale,” she says.

Aside from the flagship game, which incorporates geography with language and world culture, Around the World will be rolling out eight new products this year, comprised of Collector Card packs for eight regions of the world. Each pack includes trivia questions, a world map for tracking journeys and a Savvy Traveler bracelet with a charm specific to the region traveled.

Like so many parents frustrated by their search for attention-grabbing toys, Sholeen Lou-Hsiao harnessed her desire to teach her 2-year-old son Chinese into a profession. While online, she came across some research indicating pictographic Chinese characters' ability to provide visual stimulation and bolster I.Q.

“Why not use these abstract…characters to further develop children's…spatial perception after learning shapes like a circle, square and triangle,” Lou-Hsiao mused. “Treat these characters just like a more complex structure of lines, space and positions which make wonderful brain teasers for untrained eyes.” It was this thinking that prompted the development of the Kingka Matching and Memory Game, which teaches basic Chinese vocabulary via character matching.

Learning Chinese is no small feat, the president of the Teaneck, N.J.-based Kingka LLC realized—and it wasn't something many retailers were initially willing to embrace. While Lou-Hsiao credits specialty retailers for their willingness to try new things, she has encountered her fair share of skeptics. She recalls a specialty toy store in her hometown that rejected the game because the store owner didn't have many Asian customers. “Even after explaining that Kingka is specially designed for non-Asians and that the demand for the Chinese language has grown double digits in the past few years, she still thought she had no customers,” Lou-Hsiao tells Playthings.

Marketing an educational game like Kingka to niche retailers also proved difficult because as a “hybrid toy, you get tossed around like a hot potato,” Lou-Hsiao says. Toy stores felt like the game should be sold in bookstores because it teaches a language, while some bookstores thought the product was better suited for toy stores because of its play value. “We were falling into a crack…even though we do see those categories in their stores,” she adds.

But to those retailers who saw the potential behind Kingka, Lou-Hsaio is eternally grateful. She remembers Cathy Albro, the owner of Creative Learning in Grand Rapids, Mich., who volunteered information on how to sell to other specialty stores, and the recommendations from Roberta Sklar, a buyer for the Boston's Children's Museum gift shop who referred other retailers to her (“as she stopped by my booth at Toy Fair, I thought I heard angels singing,” she quips.)

To further entice retail customers, the company will be releasing versions 2 and 3 of the Kingka Matching and Memory Game this summer, featuring more symbols and the ability to combine all three games for even more challenges.