Both owning a business, and the retail industry, were both foreign territory when we launched Kai Kids two years ago this month. We’ve had lots of stumbles and successes and are always trying to learn and try new things, one of which has been hosting our own little trunk shows in Toronto for our local customers.

We’ve now had five or six over the past year and really enjoy meeting our clients face to face and watching their kids grow. Once in a while we get to see some of them dressed in our organic clothes, clutching one of our made-in-Canada non-toxic teethers or toting the safe sippy they bought from us. That always  makes us smile!

We are once again trying something new, a twist on our usual trunk show. This weekend in Toronto, we are joining forces with a friend, and fellow parentpreneur and eco biz person, Barb of Little Footprints Toys, another online store based here in Toronto. Together we are hosting the Eco Family Holiday Sale, carting our stock of organic clothing, safe toys, natural skincare, litterless lunch gear and accessories plus her inventory of fun, sustainable toys and games for the whole family, to our usual location on the Danforth.

We’ll both have some real deals, just in time for holiday shopping, plus some hot new products on display. Yesterday I received shipment of made-in-Canada cozy bamboo fleece sleep sacs for babies with sweet elephant and bird appliques from Nap & Nod in Vancouver! I haven’t yet had time to post them to our Kai Kids online store, but we will definitely have them at our sale on Saturday.

Little Footprints Toys will have lots of cool stuff for the little ones to try out and amuse themselves with, plus we will have a children’s musician on hand to lead a singing circle every hour on the half hour from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to help keep the kids occupied while parents shop!  And there might even be a pot of warm apple cider brewing!

So please come, join us to celebrate the season and score some great eco deals, Sat. Nov. 21, 2009, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1390 Danforth Avenue, Toronto. (near Greenwood Avenue). We hope to see you!

As soon as Halloween costumes are put away and the kids have settled down from their sugar high (Halloween and Easter are the only times of the year they get even a tiny bit of candy), we need to start planning for our big show next week. Next Friday and Saturday Nov. 6 and 7, Kai Kids will be at our booth at our favourite sale/trade show: Toronto’s popular Children’s Trunk Show.

It is a really well organized, well attended show featuring amazing products made and sold by Canadian mompreneurs. Everything is high quality, unique, gorgeous and geared to babies, moms and kids. We are one of the few retailers there, as most booths feature suppliers who make their own items.

We always enjoy the crowd, meeting new customers and chatting with loyal, repeat customers and networking with the other vendors.  This time out, we’ll have our new baby boy in tow so that should make things interesting!

So please, if you are in the Toronto area, come on out and support us, and the show.  It’s a great chance to get started on your holiday shopping and you know you’ll be supporting parents in small, local businesses. Plus, there are always lots of great deals!  This year, we’ll be having a big sale on the ever useful, durable, super-safe Klean Kanteen stainless steel water bottles.   Get them while they last!

details:

• when: Fri. Nov. 6, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sat. Nov. 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• where: The Fermenting Room in  Toronto’s Distillery District: Buildings 6 & 7
  55 Mill Street.
• www.thedistillerydistrict.com

Hope to see you there!

I just entered Peter and I and our Kai Kids online boutique in a great contest going on over at Canadian parenting site, WeeWelcome.ca .

They are promoting the plethora of Canadian parentpreneurs out there, which is great, as we all could use a little help promoting ourselves and reaching new customers. Small business is a tough go, and many, like ours, can’t afford to do much, if any, advertising. We rely on word of mouth, or word of “mom” to reach new customers and sell enough product to keep our biz afloat!

If you are a reader of this blog and/or a Kai Kids customer, we’d really appreciate your vote!  All you have to do is go on over to weewelcome.ca and sign up, then vote for Kai Kids! WeeWelcome is a great resource with lots of articles, blogs, forums, groups and contests going on all the time, and a good way to connect with other parents in your city or neighbourhood.

So please vote for us!  We could win $20,000 of advertising in WeeWelcome’s web site, newsletter and printed guides (I can’t even get my head around that figure!) plus a trip to Club Med for our whole family (baby #3 is due soon, so we’ll need it!  We haven’t been anywhere outside Canada since before we got married and had Big Boy over five years ago).

If you live in and around Toronto, please come join us tomorrow at the Temple Sinai Nursery School’s 7th Annual Boutique Night in north Toronto.

We at Kai Kids will be there, offline, with our plethora of ethically-made, eco-friendly products for babies and toddlers, plus there will be many other companies selling women’s and children’s clothing, giftware, jewelry, stationery, personalized accessories, home decor, and more. Guests can also purchase raffle tickets as there are lots of prizes to be won.

Come on out to The Temple Sinai Congregation of Toronto, 210 Wilson Ave., at Avenue and Wilson.

We hope to see you there!

It’s only Tuesday, but it’s already been a busy week for Kai Kids. First we were featured in the Toronto Star’s Sunday edition, which brought us lots of online traffic and kept us busy shipping parcels off to new customers, yippee!

Plus,  I was invited to be the guest blogger over at Canadian Family’s blog for the week, in honour of Earth Day! My first post went up today: fun ways you can help your kids grow up green. Check it out, and if you haven’t already, spend some time on their site: it’s an excellent magazine and web resource for parents, full of Canadian content, and over the past few months, they’ve really beefed up their coverage of three of my favourite topics: the environment, mompreneurs and social media!

The past few months I’ve been exploring social media online and having a lot of fun with it, not to mention learning a lot!  And I’ve found that there are a lot of smart, funny mompreneurs out there to connect with. In fact, many of our Kai Kids suppliers are also blogging, tweeting and posting on Facebook.

One site that’s become part of my daily routine is Twitter. In fact, now it’s almost an addiction. It took me a while to understand it and get into it, but now I find it fun, useful and informative, as a parent, and an entrepreneur.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter ( I post about interesting articles I find, bits of my daily life, special sales and new arrivals of eco family products at Kai Kids), check it out: www.twitter.com/greenmum !

Check out The Toronto Star today for an excellent, personal piece by reporter Francine Kopun on trying to get through a typical family’s week without plastic. It sounds like a real challenge. Depressing really, to think of how reliant we’ve become on the stuff, and just how impossible it is to completely avoid it!

Kopun tries to avoid plastic food packaging and find plastic-free alternatives to tupperware containers, plastic bags and water bottles. And great news for us, she found some at our online eco store, Kai Kids!

Since the article hit the web and newsstands this morning, we’ve almost sold out of one of our newest green products: organic cotton mesh produce bags. They are washable, reusable and very handy for the grocery store or farmer’s market. If you came to Kai Kids searching for them and we don’t have enough of the size you would like, please email us at info@kaikids.com. We are now taking preorders for a new shipment due midweek!

Another hot new eco product, another way to reduce and reuse!  I’m thrilled to have found these brand new reusable organic cotton mesh produce bags for our family’s grocery shopping needs and for our Kai Kids online store!  They really fit all of our criteria (and we are picky!):

•  eco-friendly: reusable and so you can cut down or stop using those filmy plastic produce bags at the store
• organic: Credo was previously making cotton bags but just introduced this new line made from 100% certifiled organic cotton (from Turkey), which means no nasty pesticide residues tainting your tomatoes
• ethically-manufactured: the yarn for the bags is spun in Montreal, Quebec, and the bags are also sewn there under excellent labour conditions
• Canadian:  made by a Montreal company, voila!

These produce bags come in two sizes, small (great for apples, pears, peaches, green beans, lemons, onions, garlic, peppers etc. and large (perfect for lettuce, kale, corn, broccoli, grapefruit).  They are machine washable and have a convenient drawstring enclosure so you won’t lose any of your fruit or veggies coming home from the grocery store or farmer’s market. They are also super-light so won’t add cost at the cash register when weighing your produce!

Just in time for earth day, one more way to help keep your family, and the planet, healthy!  Give them a try!

Don’t forget that tomorrow (Sat. April 4) is our big Kai Kids Spring Sale in Toronto!  We hope you can make it to check out our new earth-friendly products for families and take advantage of some special one-day only sales:

• BornFree baby bottles: 20% off
• Klean Kanteen water bottles: $2 off each bottle
• Babysoy: 20% off
• Jessica Scott eco maternity wear: 30% off
• Jolie Maman soy nursing tops: 30% off
• Little Green Star slogan T’s and onesies: 30% off
• Pip Essentials organic cotton blankets and sleepers: 25% off
• Fleurville diaper bags: 30% off
• Echoes in the Attic purses and totes: 15% off

1390 Danforth Ave, north side (near Greenwood Ave), 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.Hope to see you there!

For a year now we’ve wanted to add a gift registry to our online store, Kai Kids, so that our green-minded parents/customers could register for some of our amazing natural and organic products for new baby showers, birthdays, Christmas etc.

It’s been a long time in the works but I’m happy to announce it’s finally here!  The Kai Kids Gift Registry is now up and running and ready for action!  Just click on the Registry link at the top right of any page on our site, or  on the green Add to Registry button on any product page. You can create your own registry, or search to see whether any of your friends or family are also registered.

We And please let us know how you find using it.  We always enjoy hearing from our customers, and your feedback is important to us.

If you know of any expecting couples who might be interested in eco alternatives to regular baby gear available on most registries please pass the info along. We really depend on, and appreciate word of mouth from our customers to grow our business!