We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Annamarie Von Firley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Annamarie below.
Alright, Annamarie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How has Covid changed your business model?
Adventuretown Toy Emporium began with a successful Indiegogo campaign in 2016 that funded our website. The goal was always to open a 10,000 square-foot experiential toy store in downtown LA. I spend years curating the most innovative, unique, educational toys found the world over and bringing them to children through the hundreds of pop-up shops that we set up throughout the greater Los Angeles area growing our customer base and building the traction that investors found valuable. But Covid had other plans for us.
When Covid lockdowns were implemented in March 2020 in Los Angeles, 90% of our income came from the 200+ pop-ups per year that we did. Overnight, we had to pivot from 90% in-person sales to 100% online sales. Visibility on the Internet and in social media has always been a challenge. We had to quickly find ways of reaching our customers through social media, online parent groups, and newsletters.
Easter was coming, and no one could go out to the toy stores in Los Angeles to buy them. In prior years, we did pop-ups that featured “Easter Basket Bars“ where parents could select toys for their customized Easter baskets in the same model as a salad bar. Since that was no longer a possibility, we had to figure out how to offer that feature on our e-commerce site. I spent countless hours speaking with our developers to see how I could break the website’s template so parents could choose all the elements that could go in Easter baskets such as basket size, color of Easter grass, number of eco-friendly eggs, as well as small, non-candy toys that can go inside them, plus larger project-based activities that could keep the kids busy and off screens during the months that they would be locked in their homes. For the first time, we offered free shipping and free delivery in Los Angeles. We were told by grateful parents that we had saved Easter.
But it wasn’t until August 2020, when the second wave of Covid hit, that the most transformational change to our business model began. It was at this time that I realized that Covid wasn’t going anywhere and while pandemic-related lockdowns were going to affect all children, it was going to affect the youngest children the most. 80% of the brain is developed in the first three years of life. The children who were under three during these lockdowns, we’re not going to get the opportunity to have the types of novel experiences that create important connections in their brains because they were not going to be able to leave their homes and interact with their age mates. This was going to have a profound effect on their development and I needed to find a way to help them.
I gathered a team of experts in child development, a management team, as well as a team of developers to build an app that would provide resources to parents that would optimize their child’s development through play-based exercises, milestone tracking, and monthly customized subscription boxes. The assembly of each of these teams took months. We began the development of the app in the spring of 2021. The next eight months we spent morning to night compiling and writing over 4280 play-based exercises and developing a way to log the over 812 Milestones that children should achieve by their fourth birthday. There were weekly design and development meetings that shaped the parents experience while using the app.
Next came the process of selecting and sourcing the over 200 developmental toys that would be used with the play-based exercises and included in the subscription boxes. In the before times, I could go to toy trade shows where I could easily select from the hundreds of toy manufacturers from around the world. But all of them were canceled. Toy manufacturers at the time did not have wholesale websites. They were still relying on printed catalogs. So the selecting and sourcing of appropriate toys took months longer than it would’ve had in the past. To compound this problem were the pandemic-related supply chain issues. This meant that I wouldn’t be able to get many of toys that I painstakingly selected for months unless I found an alternative source that was in stock. Every week, I would be notified by toy manufacturers that certain toys were unavailable with no estimated time of delivery. It took about eight months to get all the toys and components used to fulfill 112 different subscription boxes that supported developmentally delayed, on track, or advanced children and focused on specific developmental skills. We began our soft launch in June 2022 at a virtual pregnancy expo.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I got my first degree in Wooden Toy Design and Construction from Hampshire College in 1993. At the time, the toy industry in the United States was not focused on child development. They produced mostly plastic toys generally centered on imaginative play, such as Barbie and G.I. Joe. There was not a place for me in any of the existing US toy companies, so I decided to move from New York to California to get my second degree in Furniture Design from California College of the Arts. While I lived in San Francisco, I worked for an all-natural perfume start-up in Berkeley while working on my own custom furniture designs. But my furniture was too sculptural for furniture stores and too functional for art galleries. So I fell into a gray area that made it in hard to find customers. In 1998, the perfume company was sold and moved to Wisconsin and I decided not to go with it. I was between careers.
My best friend decided that we should start a retro fashion house for swing dancers because our vintage clothing was getting destroyed when we went out dancing. At first I said no because I saw that my boss at the start-up company never paid herself and I needed a regular salary. Eventually, she wore me down and we launched reVamp in September of 1998 with the most rudimentary e-commerce site. Customers had to download and print an order form and fax it to us to place orders as was the height of technology at the time.
We remained business partners for the first year, then she returned to her custom corsetry business. I moved reVamp to the more affordable Los Angeles where there was a better manufacturing base in April of 2001 just as the dot com bubble burst. For the next 20 years, reVamp’s line grew to over 200 pieces of reproduction vintage clothing for men and women focused on 1910 through 1957. We made costumes for commercials TV, movies, regional and national theaters international opera houses, national parks focused on living history, as well as museums such as the Smithsonian. Our clothing could be seen in the production of “Sunset Boulevard“ on Broadway. We provided garments for Tarantino and Edgar Wright films, hit shows on TV such as “True Blood”, “Big Love”, and “Saturday Night Live”. Our garments graced the bodies of stars, such as Salma Hayek, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Alex Borstein, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Lily James, Kerry Washington, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dita von tease, Bridget Marquardt of “The Girls Next Door” where I was a regular guest on the Hugh Hefner reality TV show. ReVamp garments could be seen in fashion spreads in magazines, both local and international. In 2007, I was featured in Fortune Small Business. Later I would be featured on CNN twice.
But the fashion business is a grueling one. My time was never my own. I had my son in 2009, which made work life-balance impossible. After 20 years of working seven days a week, I wondered when I would get to do what I wanted to do. I felt that the fashion business, while successful, was never my passion. I had no background in fashion and didn’t even know how to operate a sewing machine when I started the business with my friend at the age of 27.
One particularly trying moment led me to create my second business, Adventuretown Toy Emporium. I was working on costumes for an international opera seven days a week for months. My son had three birthday parties on the weekend. It was Friday and too late to order anything online. My go-to spot for cool educational toys was the gift shop in the Central Library in downtown LA. But they were closed for renovation. There were no toy stores within 10 miles of me. I wondered where they all were and then began to wonder what if I opened a toy store what it would look like?
For two years, I ran both businesses until the 20 years of close-work made it difficult for me to see well enough to thread a needle and pick out stitching when necessary. I closed reVamp in 2018 to focus solely on Adventuretown Toy Emporium. So I made a full circle. I began with a love of toys and I am now back nurturing my love affair with toys.
Adventuretown Toy Emporium cultivates children’s curiosity by learning through play with hands-on activities that stimulate the minds of our future designers, scientist, makers, artist, thinkers, and storytellers. We boast over 3000 toys from 42 countries selected for their uniqueness, innovation, and educational value. We have toys from Ukraine, South Africa, Nepal, Peru, Thailand, Latvia, Czech, Spain, and more. We help parents feed their child’s passion, engage in their interests, and discover the magic that our world affords. We offer a personal shopping service to help parents select toys as gifts for their children, their friends, and extended family. We do occasional pop-ups post pandemic. But mostly sell through our e-commerce site, www.adventuretowntoys.com where is still offer free shipping and free delivery in LA.
In 2022, we launched Fledglings’ Flight, an app and customized subscription box that helps parents of children 0 to 3 years old optimize their child’s development through play-based exercises, milestone tracking, and subscription box tailored to their child’s unique developmental needs. We offer 100 to 200 play-based exercises for each month of life as well as an extensive resource library of articles on child development for FREE. Basic members have access to the exercises, resource library, as well as the ability to track their child’s 812 milestones that they should achieve by the fourth birthday. Premium members get everything that Basic members do with the addition of a monthly customized subscription box that features skills-based developmental toys, as well as items to be use for the daily play-based exercises. We use the data that parents provide about which exercises they have completed, which milestones have been achieved, and when they achieve them, as well as feedback on the child’s experience with the toys that they have received to create a unique developmental profile that looks for lags or acceleration. Every box meets the child where they are developmentally each month, unlike our competitors who give every child the same box of stuff.
While I am super proud of my achievements in the fashion industry, I am most proud of building Adventuretown Toy Emporium and launching Fledglings’ Flight because it will have the most profound effect on future generations by helping them become the best versions of themselves. One in 4 children are born with developmental delays. Studies released in January 2021 have shown “significant” development delays in children who were as young as six months old when pandemic-related lockdowns began in 2020. Early intervention is the best way to help them and the children born more recently to stay developmentally on-track. Gift memberships are available at https://www.fledglingsflight.com/purchase-gift-membership
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
When I started my fashion business, reVamp, at the age of 27, I didn’t know anything about fashion. My cofounder was supposed to take care of all aspects of manufacturing, and I was going to be in charge of running the business and we were going to design garments together. But because she already had her own custom corset business, she didn’t have any time for a second business. It didn’t take long to realize that she wasn’t going to be able to spend much time helping with the manufacturing side of the business. Originally we hired a First Hand from the San Francisco Opera to grade and sew, and some of my cofounder’s stitchers would help out in a pinch. In preparation for a big swing dance event at which we were going to have a booth, every person with a pulse needed to be in front of a sewing machine. I had never operated a sewing machine before, but I did know how to operate a bandsaw, and it turns out they require the same eye-hand coordination. I started with collars and cuffs.
After the first year, we decided that we were going to be friends, but not partners and I moved the business first to the Lower Haight in San Francisco with a staff of nine people. But as overhead in San Francisco began to spiral out of control, it became impossible to afford to manufacture there. In April 2021, I moved the business to downtown Los Angeles. Where I leased 1700 square-foot loft as a manufacturing space for a mere $700 a month.
For the first several years of the business, I learned from my employees how to pattern, grade, and sew. After tens of thousands of hours of work, I was a master in the field by the time I closed the business in 2018. From the beginning, we always retail manufactured. One time when I was getting ready to take the reVamp line to a swing dance camp in Sweden, I subcontracted the cutting and sewing out to another factory in Los Angeles. It was a good lesson in quality control. Half of the garments were unsellable because not all of the stitchers were very skilled. I had lost time, fabric and money. From that moment on, I never considered subcontracting our garment manufacturing again. The downside to this decision was that we were never in a position to wholesale, because there was no economy of scale. Sewing one garment or 100 cost the same amount of money. We were, however, able to adjust our production schedules on a dime, and maintain the highest quality standards which made us highly sought after by costume designers.
After 20 years of manufacturing, I chose not to go this direction when I founded my second business, where I curate and not design toys. Being a retail manufacturer of clothing meant that we really were running three businesses: manufacturing, bricks and mortar retail, and e-commerce site. In addition, the burgeoning Internet browsers in the 2010s made it an obligation for business owners to become content producers, so that they constantly had new content to draw users to their platforms. Believe it or not, there was a time when a fashion house only needed to make clothing. This added a fourth type of business to the mix.
Manufacturing is hard because you either have too much or too little inventory, and all of your cost of goods are caught up in unsold garments, fabric, and notions. You don’t get them back until the garments sell. In addition, every order was 3 to 5 hours of my life. Now in my toy business, fulfilling every order takes seconds to minutes depending if I am placing the toy in a shopping bag or shipping box. And I enjoy the instant gratification of curating the best toys in the world than having to make my own.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
One Tuesday I got a call from Saturday Night Live. They wanted to know if we were able to make some garments for one of their sketches that weekend. They needed the garments by Friday night. After discussing what they needed, I told them I could do it as long as I got the fabric and measurements for the actors by 8 AM on Thursday. I had my staff come in hours early that day so that we could pattern, grade, cut, and sew the costumes in order to pack them up and get them to FedEx for overnight delivery by 5:30 PM that same day. 8:30 AM came and went 10:30 AM came and went. I called the Costume Department at Saturday Night Live to find out if they still need us to make the costumes for the show on Saturday. They said yes. Then they realized that they shipped the package Standard Overnight with a guarantee delivery time at 4:30 PM! The package was delivered with fabric and measurements at 3 o’clock that day giving us about two hours and 15 minutes to pattern, cut, sew, pack up the order to take to FedEx. I divided the staff so that as I generated pattern pieces they were taken to the cutting table. I organized the production so that the pieces that were cut could start being sewn as soon as they came off the cutting table. Miraculously, we were able to finish all of the costumes in two hours and 15 minutes and made it to FedEx by running three blocks, arriving with only minutes to spare before the cut off. We were all spent after mainlining adrenaline all day. But it sure was fun to see our costumes on Tina Fey and Amy Poehler that Saturday.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.adventuretowntoys.com & www.fledglingsflight.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adventuretowntoys/ & https://www.instagram.com/fledglingsflight/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdventuretownToyEmporium/ & https://www.facebook.com/fledglingsflight/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annamarie-von-firley-b7650ab/
Image Credits
Jon Lile – reVamp photo