LI toy manufacturers market plush PetCakes

Fred Catapano's brown eyes widened and went soft as he lifted to his cheek Twinkle Sprinkles, a brown, droopy-eared stuffed animal puppy nestled in a fabric cupcake wrapper.

"The whole design of them is that you fall in love with them. It's an impulse item," said Catapano, president of Maspeth-based Well-Made Toy Manufacturing Corp.

"They're deliciously cute," chimed in toy designer Matt Nuccio, Catapano's partner and co-owner of Merrick-based toy design and inventing company Design Edge Inc.

For the past year, Catapano and Nuccio have been testing the market with their collectible series of stuffed animals called PetCakes, which Design Edge and Well-Made partnered to create. The response, they said, has exceeded their expectations.

What's not to like about cupcakes and baby animals, they asked. And a retail price of about $14 made the items even more enticing, they said.

PetCakes, which were delivered to Myer Stores in Australia on Oct. 19, sold out at a majority of locations before Christmas without any advertising, said the company's senior toy buyer, John Redenbach. Earlier last year, a press event held by TimetoPlayMag.com, an online consumer toy magazine, brought them to the attention of U.S. mommy bloggers, some 200 of them reviewing PetCakes, Nuccio said. The toy ranked No. 11 in TimetoPlayMag.com's list of top 25 plush toys.

Despite a limited distribution, PetCakes have been selling well at Amazon.com and Toysrus.com, said Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of TimetoPlayMag.com, who noted that the products have gone out of stock and have been reordered at both places. The toys are available at Charlie's Family Pharmacy in Seaford and will hit specialty stores across the country this spring.

The goal now is to distribute the PetCakes line much more widely by showing the stuffed animals at the Toy Industry Association's annual Toy Fair at Manhattan's Jacob Javits Convention Center, which started Sunday and ends Wednesday.

Stuffed, or plush, animals are a significant and classic category, toy industry experts said. Sales of plush toys in 2010 jumped to $1.73 billion, an 18 percent increase from 2009, according to The NPD Group, a Port Washington-based market research firm. In last year's fourth quarter, the toy industry's busiest season, sales of plush toys spiked by about 40 percent over the 2009 period.

That growth was primarily driven by Pillow Pets, a stuffed animal that doubles as a pillow, and the humming Sing-A-Ma-Jigs, said Anita Frazier, an NPD Group industry analyst.

PetCakes toys, however, combine the major children's trend of animals with cupcakes in a new way, Silver said.

"If you look at the bestselling item in plush or girls' toys, animals sell," he said. "Over the last three years there's been a great cupcake phenomenon, from Crumbs to Billy's to Magnolia, and it's one of the best-selling desserts for kids."

Affordable as well as collectible toys also have done well in recent years, noted Adrienne Appell, Toy Industry Association spokeswoman.

Sammi Richardson, 22, a Manhattan-based product review blogger who featured PetCakes in September on her "Sammi's Blog of Life," came across the toys online and said she received a "phenomenal" response from parents when she held a giveaway contest.

The PetCakes brand, which has U.S. and international patents, is designed to grow.

There are some 75 characters waiting in the wings, Nuccio said. They also hope to license the PetCakes brand to include items like mini figurines, video and board games, slippers, backpacks, pencil cases, bubble items and swimming accessories.

"We created a universe . . . a line that can keep growing and growing," Nuccio said.