About Us

History:

Hi. We are the Awesomeness Team! We started this business in our home garage (technically, my parent's garage) in 2005. (Yes! We thanked them with gratefulness and gratitude) :)  We are grateful for our parent's patience, understanding, support and believing young college students like us were serious about running a business; especially when our field of expertise was in Computer Science.

We were attending college in 2005 and were using this business adventure opportunity to pay for college books, car insurance, food and eventually in a couple of years, we were able to make enough to pay off our college tuition and help our parents out with household bills.

Keeping the story short, it took some time to grow this business as we used what ever available resources we had at that time. The eCommerce world was still growing and we were learning the in and outs of business. We worked an 8 hour full time job teaching kids and adults Martial Arts, Monday through Saturday. As you can see, it took some time to grow Toy Essentials as it started as a hobby.

Success:

Here we are, 15 years later, and Toy Essentials is still growing and sustainable. We all define success differently. We define success as being able to be aware of the changes in the environment, people and trends and then take action accordingly to move with those changes (Well...money is in there too, but it is only a piece of the pie of success). We have been through several ups and downs in the business world and have adapted to the changes. We have witnessed many many companies grow and then disappear. We don't know all their reasons, but many of them disappear because there was too much constriction and restriction in their business model; and their inability to use more creativity and imagination to grow the business. 

What we sell:

We sell limited styles of toys because we don't really need to compete with 100's of the same toys on 100's of websites. What's the point right? Our selection caters to customers who like to use our toys with their creation(s) (like dioramas, projects and board games) and also have a few toys that we know for sure (about 99%) no one has it. This way, we control the quality as best as we can.

Challenges:

As we bring more business awareness to the eCommerce world, we realized that Environment and Product Safety was the number one issue we wanted to tackle. For the environment, we have gone to lengths of being environmentally conscious about what we use, reuse, reduce and recycle. In our office and warehouse environment, we use as much biodegradable bags as possible. Plastic is unavoidable in our line of business so we use new recycled plastic from eco-conscious businesses. We reduce the amount of trash we output, pay to have our batteries recycled (never toss them in the trash!), and recycle every single cardboard, paper materials, ink cartridges and glass bottles possible.

The Future:

The future....We will continue to bring in as many unique and different toys that will bring happiness and joy to people around the world.