eeBoo's Toy Company
AUTHOR Crystal Chunnu
She started building her business in her basement, and worked at home with her children for several years until she was able to afford an office. Although eeBoo has no flagship stores, their toys are featured at 3,500 small specialty stores, gift shops, airport stores, museum shops, and retailers, such as Barnes and Noble.
To promote eeBoo, Galison attended toy fairs and regional shows in New York and decorated her booth in the best way possible to get noticed. She even created a big robot holding a sign that said “thank you” for a trade show she attended. There was no doubt that her unique line of toys propelled her to success.
“No parent ever put their kid in front of a TV and said they're going to become smarter,” Mia Galison said. “That was the novelty of eeBoo that made it do well when we first came out. I had no competitors at all ‘cause nobody was doing what we were doing.” For the past 25 years, Mia Galison has been the proud owner and founder of eeBoo, an eco-friendly toy manufacturing company that uses the original designs of children book illustrators to bring the imagination of children to life.
After graduating college, Galison briefly worked in the film industry and was married to her husband, who was a figurative painter. Unfortunately, they were able to make ends meet on their salaries alone.
“We had a baby and then five seconds later we had twins. We had three kids in less than two years and we knew it wasn’t a sustainable thing for me to have a full-time job out of the house because it was just not possible,” she said. She needed money fast, so she took a moment to examine her skillset and the marketplace.
“I knew how to curate things and I knew a lot of painters and illustrators and I thought there weren’t a lot of nice children’s things in the market … it seemed practical and interesting to make really beautiful children’s products. There was just sort of a lack of specialty toy market for 20 or 30 years.”
Galison, like most parents, was concerned about her children spending too much time in front of the TV which motivated her to create tangible toys, books, and products that revolved around free play, which she engaged with frequently as a child. “You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud or have a doctorate in child therapy to see the difference in kids that have the benefit of being read to versus the kids that don’t spend time with their parents and grow up in front of a screen,” she said.
Her mission was to have children participate in a screen-free environment with activities that foster visual creativity and literacy, problem-solving and cooperating, storytelling, quantitative learning, motor ability, social and emotional literacy, and social imaginative play as much as possible.
When children spend time with their parents, they are more likely to develop greater emotional success and social intelligence. Allowing them to play with dominos, board games, conversation cards, is a good parenting technique and essential to eeBoo’s theme of “developing the whole child.”
They believe that some of the best tangible gifts children can receive are ones that can teach them—whether it be about natural history, weather, plants, animals, or the food chain—to get involved with and question the natural world around them.
“I have a classic game called I never forget a face which is a memory game with kids’ faces … we've gotten so many letters from parents and I think people really love it”
Galison noted that eeBoo has received recognition because it was one of few, or possibly the only company out of the 60-80 toy companies at the NY Toy Show that was women-owned and not couple-owned or family-owned.
Galison received 201 Oppenheim Toy Awards—45 of which are platinum and 156 of which are gold—and publicity from magazines like Parents and Good Housekeeping. “They wanted to support me and I got a lot of free ads, free editorials, free everything because I was really an anomaly,” Galison said. “People expect the guy to run the business and the woman to do all the fun soft stuff. I didn’t know any woman that runs a business”
Galison recently joined a female organization group two years ago and advised that young women thinking about going into business should also join national or local groups immediately for the camaraderie of connecting with others who share their plight—whether you are married and running a business or are a mother and are running a business, there are supportive groups.
“I should have done it 20 years ago. I wasn't thinking about it then, but that was the best thing,” she said.
