The holiday season is a busy one for Holly Horner, the Vice President of Operations for the local family-run toy store, Thinker Toys.
But she relishes in being part of the process of helping customers select just the perfect gift for their loved ones.
“If someone comes into the store and says, ‘I am looking for a toy for a boy who is eight and obsessed with dinosaurs and this is my price range,’ my goal is for them to leave with a toy that they are happy with and that the child will still be happy with months from now,” said Horner, who likes being on the front line of customer contact.
“Christmas is our biggest time of year,” said the daughter of Thinker Toys owners John and Ann Horner of Morgan Hill. “I love it. The season is great.”
Horner, a UC Santa Cruz graduate who has been a part of the family toy business since she was 12, decorated the outside store window with a winter festival theme. She splits her time between the Morgan Hill location, which opened six years ago, and the family’s two other stores in Carmel (the flagship store opened in 1969) and Monterey (in business for the last 17 years).
Inside the Morgan Hill store, located at 311 Vineyard Town Center, there is a wide array of gift options for all ages. Horner prides herself in offering an inventory filled with unique items from the hottest toys of the year to the most specific of interests.
“I handpick the inventory myself. I’d say 80 to 90 percent of the toys in the store I personally picked,” said Horner, who always offers free gift wrapping to her customers. “It’s truly an all ages store from newborns to grandmas.”
One of the hot items leading into the holiday season has been the “Pusheen” line of iPhone cases, purses, plushies, jewelry and coloring books. Horner explained the product started out as a web comic and then became famous as stickers on Facebook poster walls.
“It’s been huge for us since the summer and hasn’t slowed down,” said Horner of the Pusheen items.
Horner not only picks out the toys sold at the shop but she also organizes and displays them with meaningful precision. She doesn’t gender segregate toys, “because we believe toys are for children, not specifically for boys or girls.”
One section is stocked with science and engineering kits such as one tagged “Catapults and Crossbows,” which gives directions on building the medieval weaponry while offering a mechanical engineering focus. There are endless “smart games” or multi-level logic games that “trick children into learning” while having fun, Horner said.
“We have Monopoly in every theme,” Horner pointed out. “Say you can’t get your child off the computer to play with the family. Well we’ve got World of Warcraft Monopoly that they can play with the family. It’s nice to meet them in the middle.”
Stuffed animals and plushies of all shapes and sizes such as a giant T-Rex and an elephant watch over the toys throughout the store and, of course, there’s a countless selection of Teen TYs and Beanie Boos. The showroom also includes a large section of children’s books with a plethora of Star Wars Rogue One selections, an abundance of arts and crafts supplies, and endless Lego building sets. For teens and young adults, they have a tower of “Metal Earth,” which is another hot item where buyers fold and assemble pieces of metal into figures and ships from shows such as Transformers and Star Wars.
“We focus on toys that children play with rather than the toys that play with you,” Horner said. “We find toys that kids have to do something with, like a science experiment, something hands-on rather than pushing a button to make it do things.”
For the dreaded Black Friday, instead of pitting consumers against one another for marked down items like at the big box stores, Horner welcomed customers with free juice and cookies, teddy bear giveaways, festive music and a homestyle slice of holiday spirit.
“If you don’t want to get trampled at Walmart, just come here for a relaxed, family friendly shopping experience,” Horner said.
And for those less fortunate, Thinker Toys donates at least two truckloads of toys and gift certificates to many local charities throughout the year, including the Edward “Boss” Prado Foundation.
“Every year, they donate to the Ed ‘Boss’ Prado Foundation all year round and especially for Christmas,” said Cecelia Ponzini, who founded the foundation in honor of her son. “We couldn’t do all the we do without all their support at Thinker Toys.”
Horner also gives away toys that students can select from in the “Panther Den” at Paradise Valley Elementary School.
“We like to stay really connected to the community,” Horner said. “Our big thing is customer service. You can’t walk into Target and say you’re looking for newborn baby stuff and expect to get the immediate attention that we give you here.”
