Site Offers Toys to Challenge and Educate Children
After 10 years in the corporate world, Michael Chick wanted out. He and his wife Susan put their heads together and decided to go into business for themselves, launching eggheadkids.com, a Web site offering toys to help children develop their brains while they’re having fun.
“Since we have three kids and a child with special needs, we felt we really felt we understood what parents are looking for in toys,” says Susan Chick, co-owner of the Houston, TX firm. “You can go out to your typical big box store and buy a battery light show and entertain the child with flashing lights and noises that don’t offer them anything in return.”
The company offers such products as arts and crafts materials, books, cars and trucks, dolls, games, puppets, stuffed toys, science and nature-related goods and many other products that are “essentially teaching them something and working their brain,” says Chick.
In 2005, the couple began obtaining the appropriate licenses to form a business and exploring what technology they we wanted to use for their online venture.
Next, they “kind of dabbled on EBay for a few months,” testing the waters to see how it worked to do business online, she says.
The company then began marketing itself through pay-per-click advertising using such keywords as “toys,” “children’s gifts,” “babies” and sometimes actual product names.
Chick admits it’s difficult to hold one’s own in a field as crowded as children’s toys. “It’s very competitive and it takes a very long time to move up there [in rankings],” she says,
Just the same, Eggheadkids.com has managed to land about 2,000 customers, many of whom are gift-givers such as grandparents. From all this, she’s expecting to clear about $100,000 in revenue this year.
For the moment, Chick anticipates staying with the pay-per-click advertising and hopes the site will move up in its rankings so it could take advantage of organic search opportunities. She also looks to strengthen customer retention with product discounts.
