Pandemic start-up has a solution for parents, children and their mountain of toys

Classi thinks many parents will want to rent, simply because it’s hard to store old toys and sometimes difficult to find a place to donate them. Photo: Unsplash/Jerry Wang

Last spring, as the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted life around the country, Rachael Classi became one of the 3.5 million mothers in America who left their jobs.

She had been working at the Durham startup Teamworks in North Carolina, heading up strategy and marketing. But childcare had essentially vanished, leaving her two young daughters, ages three and one, in the lurch. That forced her to quit her job and return home.

But now she’s part of another fast-growing statistic.

While the pandemic caused the loss of millions of jobs, it conversely led to a huge increase in new business applications. A record number of new businesses formed in North Carolina in the third quarter of 2020, The News & Observer previously reported.

Classi was one of them. She is now the founder and CEO of Tiny Earth Toys, a sustainable toy company based on a subscription model.

The idea for the company never would have come to her, she said, if she hadn’t quit her job because of the pandemic.

“We were trying to keep my kids entertained, ” she said, “but there were a lot of challenges accessing quality education materials without building an unbelievable inventory of clutter.”

Most of the toys she bought to help her daughters’ development were plastic, too. She and other mothers she spoke to worried about the environmental impact of those toys, especially as their kids quickly cycled through them, either outgrowing them or just losing interest.

Around 90% of children’s toys are made of plastic, HuffPost reported, and plastic toys are generally much cheaper than wooden ones.

“What if we all pooled together resources and just bought toys that we could rotate among ourselves, ” Classi, a graduate of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, thought. “Then we could access high-quality toys, but not spend a fortune and also not buy a bunch of plastic junk.”

When other moms expressed interest in the idea, she took it one step further. Why not create a company that could solve that issue?

Tiny Earth Toys now offers bundles of toys that parents can rent or buy. The toys – aimed at ages one to four – are all wooden and are selected by early-childhood educators. After a period of time, usually around four months, parents can return the bundle of toys in exchange for a new set.

The rental kits range from US$29 (RM121) a month to $49 (RM204). It costs around $125 (RM520) to buy one of the sets. The company also makes special arrangements for families that are ordering sets for siblings of different ages.

She thinks many parents will want to rent, simply because it’s hard to store old toys and sometimes difficult to find a place to donate them. She noted there is a closet at her house that had become a “dumping ground” for toys her daughters were no longer interested in.

“With young kids, it’s not just their interest that wanes, ” she said, but their brains are exploding in growth. Every few months they’re working on different skills and so they they need appropriate toys for that.”

Fast-growing company

The company launched in March and already has attracted hundreds of members.

The startup has been aided by US$275, 000 (RM1.14mil) investment it raised from six angel investors earlier this year, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The money is mainly being used to build up its inventory of toys and make a few hires, Classi said. Tiny Earth works with 12 different manufacturers, five of which are in North America and the rest are in Europe, Asia and Central America. Nicole April, a sustainable manufacturing and sourcing policy manager for Nike, advised Tiny Earth on picking manufacturers.

Classi, who previously led marketing at Durham’s Counter Culture Coffee, said she’s already thinking about how Tiny Earth can expand into older age groups and create more educational content. But at the moment, the company is focused simply on building its current customer base.

“We want to get zero to four-(year-olds) right and do that well first, ” she said. “But we’d love to expand into older age groups.”

Classi acknowledges she is lucky to have found a silver lining in the pandemic.

Not every mother had the support where they could quit their job, take care of children and work on a new business. And she wouldn’t have been able to without the help of her husband and other working moms who advised her along the way.

“I was lucky to be able to say, ‘Hey, on nights and weekends, I am gonna work on this idea and test it out with friends, ’” she said. – The News & Observer (Raleigh)/Tribune News Service