The company's Los Angeles-based co-founders - one's a lawyer, the other's a marketing executive - say the surge puts them well beyond the projections they made in their initial five-year business plan. Founded in 2006, KidsGive already counts FAO Schwartz and Neiman Marcus as clients.
The Karito Kids World Collection features five dolls representing different parts of the world: Mexico, Italy, Kenya, China and the U.S. An accompanying book illustrates a typical day in the life of these fictional young girls. (To promote diversity and equality, KidsGive strongly encourages retailers to stock the full line, not just one or two of the dolls.)
When producing ethnic dolls, the usual practice within the industry is to inject plastic with corresponding the skin color into the mold of a Caucasian doll. Instead, KidsGive hired a renowned doll sculptor to (literally) break the mold to make the dolls' physical features ethnically accurate. At Toy Fair, Piper from Australia made her debut as the sixth member of the multi-continental gang.