Varied merchandise a hit at Toy House

3rd-generation retailer mixes fun, education and service for success

By Lisa Casinger -- Kids Today, 2/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

When you're a one-of-a-kind retailer, people are bound to take notice and wonder how you stay in business and for Phil Wrzesinski, owner of Toy House in Jackson, Mich, there's only one answer — be open to new ideas.

The store was founded by Wrzesinski's grandparents, Phil and Esther Conley, in 1949 and back then it was purely a toy store. Toy House was located on the edge of downtown and Wrzesinski's grandfather helped a fellow retailer start a baby store across the street. When that business began to wane, Toy House bought them out and incorporated the infant business into the store.

Today Toy House remains the largest independently owned toy store in the country, with 75% of the business coming from the sale of toys. The product mix also includes about 10% furniture, 8% gear and 7% everything else. Top-selling categories include games and puzzles, books and preschool toys.

The store moved to its current location in 1967 and has about 16,000 square feet of selling space and 14,000 square feet of warehouse space in the same building.

As the third-generation owner, Wrzesinski stepped in to take the baby department to the next level in 1993 and has been building that business ever since. Average annual sales at Toy House are more than $2 million.

"Our store is unique because of the size and selection for a community of only 170,000," Wrzesinski said. "We carry everything in the baby and toy category except maternity clothing and there's not a toy store in the area with as much product as we have."

The store also invests a lot of time and energy in educating its customers and Wrzesinski said its not unusual for him to have seven or eight employees on the floor at all times to help shoppers.

"Our focus isn't just on warehousing the product, we offer a lot of educational classes, we develop educational fliers and lots more," Wrzesinski said.

When he came on board to rev up the baby business, Wrzesinski started his Shopping for Baby 101 classes. The three-part series is free and rather than being a sales pitch about Toy House products, it teaches soon-to-be parents what to look for in breast pumps, what questions to ask about cribs, what the advantages are to buying convertible cribs, what's important in dresser construction and more.

"The classes are designed around giving consumers the information they need to control the purchase," Wrzesinski said. "We started these classes in 2001 and basically we took the information we were giving our customers on a one-to-one basis and put it in a fun format for groups."

The classes also include games and product demos. One such demo involves sippy cups and finding out which are spill proof.

"We get the parents to drink out of all of them, find out which ones really are spill proof and which are spill proof because you can't get anything at all to come out," he said. "They have fun and learn about product."

Shopping for Baby 101 typically has about 20 people per class and at the end of the third class attendees receive a $10 gift certificate. Wrzesinski himself teaches a class for new dads in conjunction with the local hospitals' birthing classes.

While the combination of baby products and toys may seem unusual at first glance, Wrzesinski said it's proven successful.

"We look at our product assortment as a way to build relationships with our customers," he said. "They may start shopping with us and trusting us for our baby education classes and product and then they keep shopping with us for the toys."

Aside from offering a plethora of product, Toy House also offers free gift wrapping, delivery and assembly of furniture, layaway up to 10 months on baby products, six months on other categories, car seat installations (even if the parents didn't buy their car seat at Toy House), gift registry, special orders and educational classes.

Wrzesinski reaches customers through radio, direct mail and e-mail and has a forum on his Web site, www.toyhouseonline.com, which addresses topics like shopping locally, creativity, logos, learning toys and more.

The store has one sales event a year, a clearance sale in the summer. They take everything not selling well, mark it half price and move it out the door.

"In-store events aren't our big draw," Wrzesinski said. "Our traffic comes from word of mouth, because we've been here since 1949, advertising, our newsletter and the classes we offer."

Toy House also reaches out to consumers, and gives back to the community, through its teacher loaner program and church nursery showers. The store also is the area's authorized dealer for Boy and Girl Scouts of America.

The teacher loaner program allows teachers to borrow teaching toys for free for a week and gives them a 10% discount on all classroom purchases.

"We understand that schools have a difficult time with their budgets," Wrzesinski said. "We also know toys aren't high on their list but they can be used for simple lessons. The program lets teachers try out new things, it gets them in the store and it gets our toys in front of the kids."

The church nursery shower works much like in-home designers do with product placement. Churches looking to remodel or replenish their nurseries come to Toy House and pick out everything they need from furniture and bedding to toys and games and more. The store delivers everything to the church and helps them set it up in the nursery. The church then invites the congregation to make a donation or "buy" something in the nursery; anything not bought is returned to the store.

"People are much more willing to make a donation once they actually see the product in the nursery," Wrzesinski said. "We don't get a lot of product returned from the showers."

Toy House's biggest challenge is its marketplace. Even though there's such a small local population, one that's been affected by the auto industry's decline, the area is saturated with retailers, including two Kmarts, Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, Mejiers and more.

"We have to draw from surrounding areas like Ann Arbor and Lansing," Wrzesinski said. "We compete with these retailers by offering lots of education and building a trust with our customers."

Wrzesinski said he's had to adjust his product mix this year because of competition and has dropped bikes and riding toys from his lineup.

Like many retailers, another issue is on time delivery.

"Furniture delivery times are the worst but gear is quickly catching up," Wrzesinski said. "Delivery itself is one reason I dislike special orders. You're at the whimsy of vendors particularly for special orders. I've dropped vendors because of delivery issues."

Wrzesinski has learned a lot since he stepped into the business and said one of his best business ideas was visiting Roy Williams, the Wizard of Ads, and listening to him put advertising into perspective.

"Williams helps you understand how people are influenced to make decisions," he said. "It's not about how many people you reach but how well you reach them. We changed our advertising strategy based on that; it's now about frequency versus reach."

Toy House offers free installation on all car seats even if they weren't bought in the store.

Baby products were added to the mix early on and Wrzesinski has taken the category to a new level.

Snoopy bedding from Lambs & Ivy graces a Legacy crib.

From kid-sized furniture, cribs, Little Tikes outdoor toys and more, Toy House has a huge in-stock product mix, enabling it to compete with local big boxes and chains.

Legacy cribs and Rumble Tuff dressers showcase a variety of room decor and bedding.

Munire and Rumble Tuff are just a few of the furniture lines offered at Toy House.