Redesigning The Toy Store Experience

The Future of Retail - Micro Pilot

Current Problem: We Have Reached “Peak Toy”

Toys are a $22 billion dollar industry. The US has less than 4% of the world’s children and it buys 40% of the world’s toys, creating a situation in which the average household has between 70 and 100 toys - with 10% of homes housing more than 200 toys.

Parents don’t want them

Primary & secondary research found parents don’t want more toys: they are sick of the clutter and toys that lie around forgotten and untouched for weeks.

“I’m sick of my house looking like a giant dumping ground for forgotten toys...they have too much crap to reflect on which of their relatives spoiled them with that particular truck they forgot they ever had.” - Scary Mommy Blog: Stop spoiling my kids with toys

“Their rooms are full of legos, tea sets, doll houses, hot wheels, trains, kinetic sand…[that] lie untouched for weeks at a time. I hate the clutter.”
- Motherly Blog: I kinda hate kids toys

And kids are better off without them

Too many toys are detrimental for child development: behavioral research shows that toy overload curbs children’s creativity, focus and even affect a child’s overall happiness. The optimal number of toys for a child to have access to at any one time is 12.

As part of a study, a nursery school in Germany removed all toys for 3 months. Teachers reported that “while on the first day the children seemed bewildered and confused, by the end of the third month they were engaged in wildly imaginative play, able to concentrate better and communicate more effectively.” - Study on Identifying and Preventing Addictive Patterns in Adults  

“When children under five have too many toys, they can’t concentrate on one thing long enough to actually learn from it.” - American Childhood Developmental Research

So instead of creating an experience that sells more toys, we designed one that reduces and redistributes toys.

And importantly, in a world that seems increasingly every person for themselves, and driven by hyper-consumerism, teaches children the value of generosity and the importance of giving.

Introducing The Giving Forest

A pop-up retail concept for parents and children who have too many toys, The Giving Forest is a toy donation experience that teaches children about generosity.

Unlike the overwhelming and over-stimulating toy stores of today, The Giving Forest is a simple and focused experience that rewards children for being generous and helps parents create a culture of giving at home.

When children to donate their toy to The Giving Forest, which triggers a toy counter displaying total toys donated. The child then ‘high fives’ an interface, which registers their hand print size and displays one of three forest characters. These characters correspond to age-appropriate rewards and it’s the child’s job to find them in the forest wall trap doors to retrieve their reward (a badge or other small memento). At the end of the experience, parents receive a card with information on easy ways to continue to teach children about giving and the value of generosity.

Research and Design Criteria

In researching and developing the concept of The Giving Forest, we conducted over 25 in person interviews across key cities in the US with parents of children aged between 0 and 12, as well as visiting 15 toy stores, ranging from independent boutique shops to Big Box stores. The insights we gained from this process led to key design criteria for our toy store experience.

A simple world

As the opposite of overwhelming toy stores, which both adults and children find difficult to navigate.

“I liked the use of the word ‘world’... I find it very close to the way children think about play.” - Camilla, 29, 2y0 boy, LA

Actively engaging with children

To avoid the “gimee gimees”, where children are faced with a barrage of toys and want them all.

“Parents may dread merely entering a Toys ‘R’ Us with a child in tow, as it is a guaranteed way to forfeit the next 20 minutes of one’s life to saying no to an ever-escalating series of requests” - The Atlantic: Toys Aren’t Us

Including an instant gratification mechanism

To mitigate "Fear Of Melt Down" - the anxiety that parents feel in the anticipation of a tantrum if a child doesn’t get what he or she wants in the store.

“The worst is the full-on child meltdown, which makes parents feel so embarrassed” - Tina, store clerk, Portland.

Validating The Giving Forest

Prototyping

We used a physically crafted 8:1 scale model as well as VR prototype through Sketchfab to test our experience design for The Giving Forest. This allowed us to visualize the experience and iterate on our design.

Micropilot Testing

We created a live micropilot version of The Giving Tree as a way for parents and children to test the experience, and to get feedback on our concept. Both parents and children responded very positively to the concept of toy donation, the immediate ‘reward’ mechanism, and the take home card. Our next step for The Giving Forest would be to test it in high fidelity in a range of contexts, including schools, local farmers markets, and in retail centers.