Michael Ziegenhagen may be almost 50 years old, but as he strolls through the aisles of his Pepper Pike toy store, Playmatters, it’s as if four decades suddenly disappear from his age.
And who could blame him? Ziegenhagen’s three lively toy stores on Cleveland’s East Side are decorated to dazzle the eyes and hearts of even the most grizzled adult. Each store has the same fire engine red carpet, brightly colored toys and boxes artfully displayed on wood shelves, with small, kid-sized kiosks bursting with the season’s hottest toys.
Today, that toy is the Rocket Balloon. Basically, it’s a bicycle tire pump with a specially designed balloon you attach to the end. When the balloon is inflated, you let go of the open end and the balloon flies around the room, air squealing out of it, all to the sheer delight of 2- to 6-year-olds.
While it’s not the most educational toy the boutique store offers, it has been flying off the shelves, says Ziegenhagen.
“This is our No. 1 selling outdoor toy, ever,” he says, while inflating the multicolored balloon. “You never know where it’s going to go.”
That uncertainly mirrors Ziegenhagen’s life. Ten years ago, when he was a new product developer for Philip Morris International in Lausanne, Switzerland, Ziegenhagen couldn’t have guessed he would end up the boutique toy store king of Cleveland. A Wisconsin native, he spent more than 10 years living abroad in Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece, honing his unique taste in toys.
But it wasn’t until the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1992 that he fell in love with the idea of selling them.
“In the traditional German market, they’re really into product aesthetics,” Ziegenhagen says. “They really have an acute sense of product design and product display, color, lighting, so it’s a very, very visual experience. You’re looking at stuff that’s more than toys; it’s almost as if you’re looking at art.
“It’s hard not to have a real strong emotional reaction.”
Toys just helped solidify his vision. Ziegenhagen was already thinking about going out on his own after his tenure in the marketing department for Philip Morris and later, at American Greetings and Bonnie Bell, both in Cleveland.
Weary of the rules and bureaucracy of the corporate world, Ziegenhagen realized in the early 1990s that he wouldn’t be satisfied unless he was his own boss. The question then became, did he want to buy a franchise, buy somebody else’s business or tackle the most challenging option and start his own venture.
“Finally, after looking into it for quite some time, I realized I wasn’t going to pay somebody a franchise fee and I wasn’t going to pay somebody their inflated price of their business,” he says. “I decided to create my own business, which would be a whole lot better than a business anyone could sell me or franchise me.”
At the time of the 1992 toy fair, Ziegenhagen was the father of three elementary school-aged daughters. All parents know the frustrations of dashing from store to store looking for that “must-have” toy, only to find it sold out.
But it was even more difficult for Ziegenhagen to find the quality, developmental toy that perhaps the child doesn’t know about. The type of toy Ziegenhagen remembers from his childhood. The toy he calls “heirloom-quality.”
“We had sort of this outrage as parents of going to Toys R Us and seeing the mountains of plastic, but we couldn’t find the things that we had bought and had been given as young parents in Switzerland,” he says. “As a young parent, I was objecting to the toy that you bought today but which you relegated to the garbage in a week.”
Knowing what products your customer wants or needs is a skill every business owner must possess. But what if your average end-users are 40 years younger than you? Although they may not fork over the cash, children certainly drive the demand at Playmatters.
But don’t expect Ziegenhagen to unveil a detailed, bullet-point chart that breaks down his method for choosing his more than 10,000 items of inventory. It’s really more of a sixth sense than a learned skill, he admits.
“You might say it’s as intuitive or subjective as finding a spouse,” he says. “It’s based on your taste. It’s based on what you know to be the needs of your customers, but the good toy really jumps out at you.
“When you discover that one item, it almost literally stands up and says, ‘I am the right toy!'”
Along with his sixth sense, Ziegenhagen has benefited from good timing. The year he opened his first Playmatters store in Pepper Pike, two big names in the toy industry closed their doors.
Children’s Palace and Kiddie City both crumbled beneath the powerhouses of Toys R Us and Kay-Bee Toys. The big box toy retailers had a lock on the Greater Cleveland area, or so it appeared until Ziegenhagen started chipping away at the other stores’ market share.
“I was very fortunate in coming to Pepper Pike for our first location because I met with a very highly educated and very discerning consumer,” Ziegenhagen says. “I met with a consumer who understood what I was about and appreciated the mission I had given this business and wanted that type of product and service in the life of their child or grandchild.”
Ziegenhagen can cite several customers who have been with him since the beginning: The grandfather who sends his grandson in Phoenix a toy every month and has done so since the first store opened. The Egyptian-immigrant pediatrician and father of three who selects all his children’s toys — a duty more often relegated to the mother. The grandmother who spoils her only grandchild with toys selected by the store’s staff — an increasingly common occurrence today with fewer grandchildren per grandparent.
These customers, and thousands of others, helped Ziegenhagen open his second store in Shaker Square in 1995 and his third in uptown Solon in 1998. Although it may look like he’s on a three-year store-opening cycle, Ziegenhagen says he has no plans yet to open a store this year because he hasn’t found the right location.
“We don’t just sort of show up in shopping centers or large malls,” Ziegenhagen says. “We tend to niche ourselves in strip centers that have an identity with the community or the neighborhood that they serve. I can’t overemphasize the importance of a successful, distinctive retail concept like Playmatters is really based on encountering the right consumer audience.”
Ziegenhagen doesn’t need to look any further than across his dinner table for his advisory board. His wife, Darlene Shibley-Ziegenhagen, is vice president of Yours Truly, a chain of distinctive family restaurants in Northeast Ohio.
“We do a lot of sharing and brainstorming together,” he says. “I’m able to really to benefit from her daily operation in running a small chain of restaurants. Staffing issues, system issues, advertising, leasing, they’re reoccurring all the time.”
Shibley-Ziegenhagen, who runs the chain of six restaurants with her three brothers, says that when the couple moved back to Cleveland with their children, the growth of Yours Truly helped spur her husband to open Playmatters.
“It really worked out well because it was a time when Yours Truly needed the fourth person,” she says. “Michael really loved the fact that they excelled as a family-run business and that they would always be a good sense of motivation for him.”
That hands-on experience with customers kept Ziegenhagen from leaping headfirst with his competitors into full-fledged e-commerce as the preferred method of selling toys. Headlines declaring the demise of eToys.com, Toysmart.com and RedRocket.com, all online toy retailers, showed that the Internet is not the smartest way to sell toys unless the shopper knows exactly what he or she wants.
Although he does have a Web site where customers can search the catalog and place orders online, Ziegenhagen knows his customers oftentimes need advice, the kind they’re not going to get online or at a big box retailer.
“No matter how well the image is depicted in full-color on the screen, and no matter how extensive the accompanying copy is describing the product, you must be able to pick it up, to feel it and to see what the toy can actually do,” Ziegenhagen says. “We greet and we actively interact with customers, suggesting toys that are appropriate for the child’s age, interests and abilities, and to some extent, season.
“There are very few stores today that provide that level of service.”
By the way, Ziegenhagen has never had a store manager leave in his nearly 10 years in business, and his part-time sales staff members only leave when they graduate from high school or return to college.
“I don’t overmanage people, and I guess I know from the corporate world what it’s like to be stifled by too covetous management structures,” he says. “My expectation is that they will maintain a colorful, friendly, engaging atmosphere, and I do all the buying myself. They’re given a great deal of personal freedom to run their operations independently.”
Playmatters’ steady growth has reached somewhat of a plateau with its three stores, Ziegenhagen admits. He believes that opening a new location would require another layer of management, a move he’s not sure he’s ready to make. He might just wait until his oldest daughter, Libby, 19, is ready to run the business, which she says she intends to do.
“Everyone wants to tell a growth story; the question is, growth at what cost? What are you losing?” he says. “I think a lot of people have said, ‘I’ve leveraged my way and I have 80 locations,’ but the truth of it is, a lot of them are surviving on helium.
“My concern is I would be dealing with people who don’t share the same love and commitment that’s really critical to nourishing and really making the business successful.” How to reach: Playmatters, (216) 464-2424
Morgan Lewis Jr. ([email protected]) is a reporter at SBN Magazine.
