Play Merrily Blog

One of the best ways of getting the product you need is to read what other people say about it and we love it when our customers add their thoughts to our sites.

One recent review which has been massively appreciated by other purchasers is this one for the Shape Matching Board by BigJigs, a popular toy with loads of play value and a very pleasing educational benefit too.

Shape Matching Board

We’re launching a Review Club on all of our websites. Add a unique and individual review* to a product, using your name so we can see who it was from and once a month we’ll pick out the very best of the reviews and send the lucky winner(s) a free product. The product will be theirs to keep and all we ask is you write us a review of it.

Simple – but you’ve got to be in it to win it!

*We reserve the right to remove reviews if they are copied from other websites, duplicated or not relevant to our customers.

We’d like 200 fans for each of our websites. So,we’re going to try a give away. I’ll offer a £20 voucher when each page reaches 200 fans. You get one ticket in the draw for being a fan(present fans will be included), an extra ticket for posting this draw on Facebook and or twitter and an extra ticket for each person who lets me know they joined because of you.

You need to tell me what you’ve done in the comments, so i can keep track! If we get more than 400 tickets on a draw (per site) we’ll add a second prize.

Some of our customers may know that in April Max and I had a little boy – Freddie. Sadly, Freddie was born with unexplained brain damage and although he lived for 11 days, he never recovered and died in hospital in mid April. During that time he was cared for by the amazing team at Hinchingbrooke SCBU in Huntingdon who looked after him, and us, wonderfully and went out of their way to make the experience as bearable as possible for our 4 daughters as well.

We’ve pledged to make Hinchingbrooke our business charity and many of our suppliers are contributing toys, comforters & even money towards a gift for them. We hope that anything we can give them will help to continue their work not only caring for babies, but also the siblings who find themselves caught up in a frightening and painful world when a new baby is born sick or does not come home.

We’ve set up a special free gift option on PlayMerrily, CraftMerrily & JollyDollies – if you spend £20 or more, you can place a virtual free gift in your basket instead of one of the other options that are available. It won’t cost you anything, but Max and I will contribute £1 towards Hinchingbrooke SCBU each time a voucher is chosen and we know that over the year this will add up to something that will help to make a real difference towards the unit and those who find themselves unwillingly part of that world.

Alternatively, we have set up a JustGiving page in memory of Freddie, which will contribute directly to the hospital trust. We understand we can request the money is sent directly to SCBU

We’d also like to thank everyone, from customers to suppliers to our many friends in the toy trade who have been so kind and caring towards us during this awful time. It made all the difference.

Thank you.

After adding PlayMerrily Toys to our long standing Hama Beads website, BeadMerrily 2 years ago, we’ve gone up in the world quite a lot and now stock over 4000 products, from polymer clays to dolls and wooden toys, plus a huge range of baby toys.

Recently we’ve added a specialist dolls website JollyDollies to the family and we’re now thrilled to have completed the family (for now, never say never!) with an updated craft website at CraftMerrily, selling not just our signature Hama Beads, Fimo and Sculpey but also Fashion Angels Design Kits, Plasticine and wonderful paints from Reeves, Tulip and Inscribe.

Over the next few months there will be an exciting redevelopment of BeadMerrily and more activity on our Fimo Ideas blog too – we hope you enjoy our newly expanded family!

For more information about our company, please visit our Merrily Toys & Crafts Ltd information site, including a special support desk for all your queries!

We’re off to exhibit at the great Bonkers About Babies show tomorrow, a bit of a first for us as up until now there has never quite been time in the diary for making extra work for ourselves.

We’re very excited to be taking some of our great new brands to the show; Kaloo, Moulin Roty, Orange Tree Toys, Kidorable, Crocodile Creek and more. The stand looks great, really colourful and all i wish is that i’d got one twice the size!

If you are coming along, please pop by and say hello; we’ve got some lovely offers and giveaways and Cuckoo Lts, who have sponsored our stand, have brought some lovely specialss to dip into – plenty of bargains to be had!