Thursday, October 1, 2026
Operating online, a Baldwin-based educational toy retailer has swiftly scrambled to the top of its market niche and plans to open a bricks-and-mortar storefront near the corner of Grand and Sunrise Avenues in November.
When resident Carol Kennedy’s children grew old enough to require only semi-constant oversight, she began to look for constructive ways to apply her freshly liberated energies and attention. Having been out of the daily workplace for around a decade, re-entering the labor force didn’t feel right, but she did want to put her skills to use doing something challenging.
Fortuitously, her husband Joe — an IT consultant with 30 years of experience — was busily building e-commerce platforms for a number of large companies. When an old friend sought Joe’s advice about marketing an educational toy, Joe thought he might have found a business venture worthy of his wife’s attention. In 2007, after a quick blending of e-commerce technology and educational toys, Glammatoys went live.
The next few years saw a rapid rise in the company’s profile. “We don’t compete with the huge, mass-market toy companies,” Joe explained. “If you’re looking for the latest electronic games or this year’s version of the Zoo Zoo Pets, we won’t have it. We specialize in unique toys that kids can learn from. Most parents will be familiar with this phenomenon: You give a kid a toy, he or she opens it up and then spends the next three hours playing with the box. We don’t want to sell that kind of toy. We want to sell toys that will become your kid’s favorite. The kind of toy that they’ll eat with and sleep with for years.”
This less-is-more philosophy seems to be resonating in the marketplace. “After only a few months in operation we realized we had a tiger by the tail,” Kennedy said. “We very quickly became one of the top e-retailers of the kinds of toys we sell.”
