Toot Toot Toys Turns 3
When ‘mumpreneur’ Maxine Auld met her 12 month sales budget in 12 weeks, she knew she was onto something.
Toot Toot Toys, which lays claim to Australia’s largest range of toy trains, quickly outgrew the Auld’s spare bedroom and is celebrating its third birthday in its own warehouse.
As an online retailer and mother of twins, Auld says her ability to cater to a small niche with an unmatched range gives Toot Toot Toys a huge advantage over bricks and mortar retailers. Toot Toot Toys offers more than 1400 toy trains, including 900 from the Thomas the Tank Engine range.“I started Toot Toot after I went shopping with the twins looking for Fergus, one of the Thomas engines,” Auld said. “Some of the big stores might have had 20 engines but there are around 100 in the range.”
“We were very naïve,” said the former safety inspector. “I thought that if I set up a web site for people who love toy trains, I might sell five a month. So I bought $5000 worth of stock and thought that if it didn’t sell, we’d put the trains on eBay. I hadn’t factored in the cost of building the web site, product insurance, company set up, prepaid couriers and so on, which added up to around $10,000. Thankfully, we had sales of $20,000 in 12 weeks.”
“Toot Toot grew out of the spare bedroom into a second bedroom, then into the lounge room. We added more space in the roof and then another 11 square metres to our home before we just had to move into our own warehouse and showroom in Cheltenham this year.”
Screenshot from Toot Toot Toys.
No comments yet.
Leave a Reply