Congratulations to our April Store of the Month, Kite Connection in Huntington Beach, CA! This has indeed been a long overdue award, since Kite Connection has supported Blue Orange for many years. Our sales rep, Xavier, calls them one of Blue Orange’s “best specialty store customers”. In my conversation with the store owner Dave, I had the excellent chance to learn more about how strongly Kite Connection encourages fun and play when selling their kites and toys.
Dave’s passion for kites started when he and his friend’s older brother would fly sports kites together. He even started selling kites out of his parents’ house when he was just sixteen. By 1991 he secured a kite stand on the beach after working for a kite manufacturer. While selling kites, Dave got in touch with Kite Lot and Store of the Month Winner Rehoboth Toy & Kite Company. They encouraged him to branch into the toy industry, and it wasn’t before long that he met Blue Orange Games at Toy Fair and started buying our games. His best-selling Blue Orange Games are Ring It! and Gobblet Gobblers. He’s also a personal fan of one of our older games Trigger.
The Kite Connection
Theyre flyin!
Dave’s biggest piece of advice to budding store owners is stay proactive, “hands on,” and let kids play with the toys and games. He thinks it’s best to encourage customers to play and understand the toys they want to buy. One of the biggest challenges in selling games, however, is finding energetic and passionate employees to interact the customers. He always finds he gets the best employees when he “pays them what they deserve” and rewards them for their work. He also believes it’s important to create a fun working environment to facilitate employee-customer engagement.
Dave’s favorite part about running Kite Connection is seeing the kids and the parents in the community have fun with the kites, toys, and games he sells. Like many stores Blue Orange partners with, Kite Connection has such a huge presence in its community. Dave shows off his kites in school assemblies and he’s been doing this for so long, customers have told him that they met their spouses at these assemblies.
Congratulations to Kite Connection for your fantastic work in promoting our games. We are so thrilled to work with you and we can’t wait to see what you do in the future. Check out Kite Connection at 61 Main St, Huntington Beach in California. If you can’t visit them in person, check out their website here.
