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Welcome to Toy Fair, 2010!
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Shidonni
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My favorite part of Toy Fair is also what makes me glad that there are still
physical 'brick and mortar' book stores: that you often end up finding things
you never knew you were looking for. Every year I hope to stumble upon a company
that embodies that ideal - a cool product that is in some way something new that
I've never seen or heard of before. This year,
Shidonni
is that company.
They are based in Israel, so traveled a long way for the show, but were exited to demo
their product. They have software that allows kids to rapidly and easily design their
own virtual world and animal, and animate it with intuitive and fun tools. The really
brilliant twist, however, is an additional service that they have just started providing
several months ago. They will create a hand made, one of a kind plush animal based on the
design that was created in their software. Now a child can have a physical animal that
they themselves designed, and that was handmade by skilled craftspeople just for them,
shipped in a special container with remarkably fast turnaround and at what is honestly a
very reasonable price.
This is a simply fantastic idea. I would have loved this as a kid with my huge stuffed
animal collection - heck I love it now - and they are executing it wonderfully so far.
It does feel like one of those things that might have trouble scaling, but I think that
for the volume of sales they would aim for, that they will be able to keep up through
moderate and planned growth of their production facility. I am certainly always saying
that the demands of mass production are resulting in the low quality of product these
days, so this handmade trend is a welcome sight. It was a real pleasure to meet with
the CEO of this innovative company, and I wish him and his idea all the best in 2010.
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Product Images:
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