iQ Toys launches Toy Secretary in the US!November 2004 |
| iQ Toys (www.iqtoys.co.nz) , New Zealand’s largest online toy store, has launched a unique birthday reminder service catering specifically to the huge US market. Says Julie Epps, Manager “‘Toy Secretary’ was originally started as a value-added service to our customers in August 2003. The service has proven to be extremely popular and we now have 1,400 subscribers. The success in NZ service has demonstrated the potential for it to be taken international” |
| Toy Secretary works as a birthday reminder service. Customers simply fill out a form with the names and birth dates of the children they would like to be reminded of upcoming birthdays for. Normally these children are relatives (i.e. grandchildren or nieces and nephews) or the children of close friends. The Toy Secretary at iQ Toys is an automatic feature that then sends a reminder email a pre-determined number of days prior to the child’s birthday. The email contains a link to a specially customised web page with age appropriate toy recommendations. Customers then just click on the products they would like to order and proceed to purchase them online in the normal manner. |
| iQ Toys has purchased the domain name www.toysecretary.com and a website is being developed to promote the service. Say Julie, “toysecretary.com will actually contain gift suggestions for a number of key US online toy retailers like Amazon.com and eToys.com. We will then earn affiliate income when subscribers click through from our gift suggestion page to order from these sites.” Julie estimates that, as the service gathers momentum, it has the potential to provide a huge perpetual income stream to iQ Toys. The staff at iQ Toys, based in Cambridge will carefully select the products for the recommendation pages based on their years experience in running iQ Toys. |
| Julie say she thinks the Toy Secretary service is a world first and another example of how kiwi’s, by thinking outside the square, can overcome our huge geographic limitations. |
iQBaby is part of the 
LeftBrain Group of webstores.