Automoblox In Car Magazine

We were pleased to get the Automoblox cars featured in Car Magazine this month.



We would have been ecstatic but they included the web address and pricing from the US Automoblox site instead of our own. Fortunately Patrick Calello has arranged for a link from their store locator page to www.kidEstore.co.uk

The car (the Automoblox X9 actually) got a full page spread though and look great!

Melissa and Doug Wooden Toys

Melissa and Doug are well known in the USA for their range of high quality wooden toys. We love their toys for the beautiful design and their educational value.

We will be taking a large part of their range including the Band in a Box Set, Wooden Beginner Band Set, Wooden Abacus, Wooden Shape Sorting Cube, Wooden Stacking Train, Wooden Pound a Peg, Wooden Shape Sorting Clock, Wooden Farm Sound Puzzles, Wooden Vehicle Sound Puzzles and Wooden Tool Box.

All of their items have that little something extra without being any more expensive than more mundane versions. It just goes to show that great design doesn't need to cost a lot of moey.

Click here to buy Melissa & Doug wooden toys in the UK.

Pastelle Geomag gets girls building

Many construction toys are aimed squarely at boys and getting girls to take an interest in construction can be an uphill task. Geomag have now bought out a Pastelle range in pretty pinks, yellows and purples which is proving a real hit!


Geomag Pastelle is completely compatible with the rest of the Geomag magnetic building range and is available in 42 and 60 piece sets, and as an 84 piece set including panels to allow solid shapes to be built.

Click here to buy Geomag in the UK.
Click here to buy other constriction toys in the UK.

Marble Madness

There are certain things in life kids love (whatever their age).

Marbles and anything that glows in the dark are right up there on the list. That is why we love the Quercetti Skyrail systems. Starting from 9 metres of glow in the dark track for you to build crazy marble runs either from the enclosed plans or to your own design.

Larger sets add more track or even a motorised elevator to to take the marbles from the bottom of the track and deposit them back at the top. Perpetual marble madness guaranteed.

Dragons create Bedlam

After the Bedlam cube was featured on the BBC2 show "Dragons' Den" demand for the great puzzle cube went through the roof!

We sold out in a night, reordered and then sold out again by the weekend. By this time there was a national shortage of the cubes and we were unable to get any more of the Retro Bedlam Cube.

We ended up taking stock of the

Translucent Purple Bedlam Cube (fiendishly difficult due to being able to see both sides of each piece at the same time) and the very attractive Wooden Retro Cube which comes in it's own wooden crate.

All in all quite exciting and we expect the Bedlam Cubes to be a key part of our range for some time!

K'Nex Big Builds

We've had some great new big construction sets in from K'Nex.

The K'Nex Pirate Ship Park is a great advanced build from K'Nex. It took my five year old son and I a couple of hours to complete, but it was well worth it. At two and a half feet tall it is quite an impressive sight.

Once complete, set the engine running and the boat begins to rock higher and higher eventually starting to loop the loop. As the Pirate Ship turns over the passengers start to scream - great fun!

In addition to the Pirate Ship there are two other full scale rides to build so I can write off another couple of Sunday afternoons.















The K'Nex Musical Ferris Wheel is another in the K'nex big builds range. Standing slightly taller than the Pirate Ship Park it is equally impressive. Start the ride running and fairground music starts to play - ever so graceful.

Again K'Nex supply instructions for the Ferris Wheel and two other models so there is plenty of life in this kit too.
















Both of these models leave you really impressed with the designers at K'Nex. the number of components and complexity of connections must really require some serious architectural skill - not to mention great CAD software!

We also learnt a lot about the physics of the models. Lots of triangles in the frame for strength, the complex connectors and angles involved. We had some trouble getting the Pirate Ship to loop the loop and it turned out to be a single joint which had not been snapped together properly. This seemed to be allowing the energy of the ship to escape as the frame flexed - snapping the joint together fixed the problem. Just goes to show how carefully the model must have to be designed!

Click here to buy K'Nex in the UK.

Bedlam

We have just received some stock of the Retro Bedlam Puzzle cube.

This is a great little puzzle cube made up of 13 individual shape pieces that can be slotted together to make a solid cube. There are 19,186 known solutions to the puzzle and anyone who comes up with a new solution will recieve fame (their name on the Bedlam Puzzle website) and fortune (a goolden puzzle cube).

It is a really addictive puzzle and we have already lost many hours productivity to fiddling with it.

Pledge to help build a Gambian School

The Friends of Fajikunda Roots Daycare Nursery have launched their buy a brick appeal and there is a pledge up on Pledgebank.

As previously mentioned the Friends of Fajikunda aim to raise enough money to build a new school building for the existing Roots Daycare Centre in Fajikunda, The Gambia. This will allow the school to continue to provide poorer children in Fajikunda with the access to affordable primary education. Why not take a look at the faji.org.uk charity home page or sign up for the pledge if you feel you can afford to help Gambian children get an education.

Pledgebank is a social engineering site designed to get people to take action that they believe will only be effective if only they could convince enough other people to also take that same action. People promise to take a certain action iff a specified number of other people will also take that action. Hopefully enough sympathisers are found, the pledge is successful and everyone follows through on their promise. Some of the pledges are really quite interesting.

New Automoblox Supplies

Just had some great news from our suppliers, the new Automoblox cars are now available in the UK. We hope to soon be adding the A9 Compact, the M9 Sports Van and the X9 Sports Utility to our site.

I think some of the new models are even better looking than the originals and will give us a much better range to offer our customers, especially in the construction toy segment for 3 year olds.

The cars appeal so much because not only are they smart toys designed with child psychologists to stimulate mental capacity but they are also really great looking cars and great fun to play with.

I keep one on my desk!

Geomag Price Promotion

We like the magnetic construction set Geomag. Our son has had a few packs and we have been surprised by the amount of learning packed into it. Magnetic circuits anyone? Demonstration of the law of conservation of momentum?

We have looked at other magnetic construction sets but they really do not have the strength of Geomag and this simply means the models he builds are not as robust. There is nothing as frustrating as spending a while building a model just for it to collapse once you get past a certain size. We think Geomag certainly lives up to their claim of being the original and the best.

The only issue we have had has been price, Geomag has always been priced above the competition. We were a little worried about this, but then you have to pay for quality and we are aiming to be a quality supplier so we decided to go with Geomag but start with a limited range to test the water. Well we have been quite pleasantly surprised to be contacted by our supplier to let us know Geomag are bringing in some promotional pricing to allow it to compete with the competition on a more equal footing. Now we believe we can really put some effort into the product and push some more lines.

They are also launching a new product called DekoPanels that comes with software to allow you to print images to be fixed onto Geomag panels before assembly. You can then construct a completely unique product with your image on it - whether it is a starscape on a buckyball or pictures of the kids on a cube for Dad's office desk. So now it looks like we will launch with Geomag Colour, Geomag Glow in the Dark, Geomag Pastelles, Geomag Panels and Geomag DekoPanels.

Roll on launch!

Supplier support

I have been fairly amazed by the level of support offered by some of the toy suppliers out there.

Some of them are fantastic, one good example is KN'ex who have a fantastic extranet to support their vendors. Plenty of images and information available for you to download at will. Many of the vendors we have dealt with have been really good, cutting CDs or emailing images really quickly. They have made it eaasy for us to put up some attractive product pages for them which should result in us, and therefore them, selling more of their products! Here is what we were able to do with KN'ex at kidEstore.co.uk

Other manufacturers, and I am not going to name names, are really poor. I am amazed how many don't send catalogues and price lists without being chased for weeks, this is just plain bad business and makes me wonder what their sales support will be like. Then there are the ones with non-existent or poor images. OK, I can understand those with no images - the internet is not everyones cup of tea (or even their area of expertise - although they had better learn fast). What I don't understand is those that send poor quality quality images - we have had the lot - miniscule images, weird proportions and really odd backgrounds. These are supposed to be promotional images for their products to encourage sales!

Still, we have a digital camera and a light studio so I guess there is a bit more work for me once some of these lines arrive with us!

Friends of Fajikunda

Quite a busy time at the moment, I am also donating some of my time to help some friends who run their own charity to get a web site up and running.

The charity was set up to help the "Roots Daycare Centre", a primary school in an area of the Gambia with which they have family connections. The Gambia is not one of Africas poorest nations and does actually provide free secondary education, the catch is unless you can afford to pay for primary education you are unlikely to get into a secondary school. The charity has already purchased some land near to the existing school and now they want to construct a new school building where they can continue and improve the provision of accessible education to 3-7 year old children.

I believe the only sustainable way to improve your lot is through education, and I think this applies to individuals, a village, a country or a whole continent. I hope the school goes on to change the lives of many children for the better.

No-one connected with the charity takes any expenses from contributions, every penny goes directly to help the Roots Daycare Centre.

You can find out more about The Friends of Fajikunda by following the link.

Starting out

We have been frustrated in the past by the lack of a good source of educational toys for our children.

It seems there are a few out there but a single good source is really hard to find. Sites either offered a very limited range of product, the price was too high or the web site was a real challenge to use.

We decided we had had enough moaning and decided to start our own store http://www.kidEstore.co.uk/ This blog will be a collection of thoughts & links related to toys, education and the creation of our store.