Gold Minds nets $10,000 prize in competition

Steven Diullo, sole partner of Gold Minds, said the contest was presented by Brio Toys, which asked participants to send pictures of displays for its Plan Toys line. The grand prize in the national competition was a trip to Thailand or $10,000.

Brio’s Plan Toys are wooden toys, including a line of dollhouses, activity toys and play sets with city themes. The play sets include roads, airports and parking garages.

“It’s a really neat company. They are very environmentally conscious. They found out that after 25 years rubber trees stop producing and the farmers cut them down and burned them to make charcoal. They thought that there had to be a better use for them so they started making these toys,” said Diullo.

Keeping the city-themed play sets in mind, Diullo and his staff came up with a plan for a display.

“One of the girls said “Why don’t we make it like the Hollywood sign? Why don’t we build a mountain and make a cityscape so it would look like there is a city (with) more city beyond?’” Diullo said. “Now, I’m creative, but I just don’t even have the skill to come up with something like that. I have a wonderful staff. Some of them are teachers, some are former teachers, then we have two college students who are just really creative.”

The project evolved, eventually resulting in a miniature – but richly detailed – city in the company’s spare room.

“Over the course of three weeks we built an entire city. We used blue vinyl to make the walls into sky and hung clouds from the ceiling. Then they took the paper and boxes that we had gotten the product out of and cut out all of the buildings. They cut out windows so they could backlight them like there were people in the buildings,” said Diullo.

In the foreground, Diullo and his staff constructed a city using Brio Plan Toys, even figuring out a way to incorporate the line’s baby toys into the display.

“The baby toys have unique shapes because studies have shown that it is important for babies to see different shapes and different colors, so the toys kind of look like sculptures. So we made a little sculpture park with the little people standing around looking at the sculptures,” Diullo said.

During construction, he said, staff voluntarily stayed after hours to get the project done.

Laura Teegarden, a retired teacher and assistant manager at Gold Minds, enjoyed working on the display.

“I wanted to be a part of the team first of all, but also it was just kind of a creative thing. I was a teacher for 30 years, and it was a chance to just let it go a little bit and be creative – to get to cut and paste and do all of the things we used to do at school. It was an outlet, like playing with toys as a kid again,” Teegarden said.

To engage customers and their children with the display, Gold Minds put a questionnaire in the store, which could be filled out in exchange for discounts.

“We asked questions like ‘How many red cars do you see? How many houses do you see?’ … ,” Diullo said. “ And we weren’t strict on the answers because we wanted them just to have fun, because learning isn’t always about getting the right answers it’s also about trying,” said Diullo.

Two weeks after sending in the store’s entry, Diullo got a congratulatory call from Brio.

For the five employees who helped with the display – the store has eight employees – the holidays will be a bit brighter this year because of the prize money.

“Everybody gets a big Christmas bonus this year,” Diullo said. “We had to set aside a little bit of the money for the store because of the cost of the toys used in the display, but everybody that worked on it will get a nice bonus.”

Gold Minds has been in its 3354 S. National location since March 1 – a move that seems to sit well with customers.

“It’s been very positive. Depending on how the Christmas season bears out we are going to run a 30 percent increase in business since the move,” compared to the year before relocating, Diullo said.

He declined to disclose specific revenue figures for the store.

While the store does quite a bit of business with teachers, Diullo said that one thing that sets it apart is that its focus is helping parents to augment their childrens’ educations.

“ … I think we are really able to communicate the value of play in terms of child development,” he said.

When possible, Gold Minds offers free enrichment classes for young children. Previously, the store has offered a sign language class for babies, a skill-builder class and a kinderdance class, Diullo said.

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