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 check for safety, overall quality and value.
Our goal, our job really, is to find only the most Super Cool Toys out there and bring them to you here in one location. However, sometimes a toy can appear to be Super Cool until we fully test the toy.
Testing might uncover some minor flaw or other reason we ding a toy down a notch. It could be that the toy is Super Cool but it’s just a little over priced or maybe the toy is initially Super Cool but after a short time we or the kids loose interest. Or maybe the toy is Super Cool but playing with it makes a really big mess.
There’s lots of variations and reason why we might bump a toy from Super Cool to Very Cool or even Pretty Cool and we will clearly explain the reasons for our opinion in detail for each product.
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 Super Cool toys. So we discount them deeply and hope it’s just the right toy for someone.
We hope to never have Tepid Toys. Our goal is to do our job well enough to always have only Super Cool toys, but since we are human and this is the real world, we are allowing for mistakes and miss judgements. What we will NOT do is call a toy Super Cool unless we really believe it is a Super Cool toy.
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.
A Super Cool Toy will typically embody all of these qualities and appeal to parents and kids alike.