Our cool ratings are arrived at by very careful, precise means. We play with our toys! We let the kids play with the toys and our friends’ kids play with the toys and our neighbors’ kids play with the toys. Basically, any age appropriate kid we can recruit we let play with our toys.
In addition to getting a child’s direct opinion about a toy, we observe the kids in action. We watch our children’s enthusiasm when they are first introduced to a toy and over time. We also pay attention to the durability of a toy both initially and overtime. And, of course, we watch for safety, overall quality and value.
Our goal is to find the coolest toys out there and bring them to you here in one location; providing as much information as we can for each toy. One way we do this is with our Cool Rating system. There are lots of reasons we might rank a toy as Super Cool, Very Cool or Pretty Cool and we will explain the reasons for our opinion in detail under the Why It's Cool tab for each product. Sometimes a toy in and of itself is super cool, but we think it’s a little over priced so we rank it as Very Cool. Or perhaps a toy is super cool in almost every way but makes a really big mess and needs lots of supervision so we rank it as Pretty Cool. You get the idea.
We sometimes might carry Tepid Toys. This is equivalent to a toy close out bin or clearance section. This category will include toys that we really misjudged early in our process. Toys we thought were cool but through testing or the market place we discovered them to be not even Pretty Cool. Tepid Toys are toys we really don’t want to represent our standards, but for whatever reasons we have them in inventory and need to move ‘em to make room for more cooler toys. So we discount them deeply and hope it’s just the right toy for someone.
We know that our cool ratings are a little subjective and that tastes vary. There are, however, several very concrete qualities we look for while evaluating a toy and these are qualities most will agree are important in a toy. These qualities include product safety, the “Wow Factor”, value, durability and longevity.
Cool toys typically embody all of these qualities and appeal to parents and kids alike.