It's the Time of the Season… for Planning

If there’s a life lesson that always holds true, it’s that it pays, often literally, to look and plan ahead. Even though it’s technically still winter, for retailers it’s the season to prepare for next fall. All too quickly, spring and summer days will breeze by, and it’s back to school for the kids, and back to the store for Mom and Dad. Don’t miss the buying bus! Now is the ideal time to do your homework on what products will make the grade in your store for Fall 2011.

Not only will kids need the usual pens, pencils, paper, new tennis shoes and sweaters, but chic backpacks and lunch bags are just as pivotal. What kid doesn’t want to show up at school with a lovable Milo the Dog backpack, or an eye catching Transformers tin lunch box? To earn an A+ in sales, be sure to also stock some eco-friendly reusable lunch and snack wraps, featuring eye-catching designs like sock monkeys and Eastern artwork. Plan to succeed this autumn with up-to-the-minute fashions, necessities and accessories from Little Packrats, Redfish Kids Clothing, The Tin Box Company, and PB GREEN.

Little Packrats Contains The Clutter

Founded and designed by Cathy Berse-Hurley, Little Packrats was born only a few years after Berse-Hurley’s children. The items the children needed with them at all times were too many to fit into pockets or sufficiently inside a normal-sized tote. Berse-Hurley realized that there needed to be bigger, kid and fashion friendly bag options for hauling around life’s crucial clutter.

Little Packrats is a family operated, woman-owned American company, as is CBHstudio, the sister company that produces the products. Keeping the work on USA soil is very important to Berse-Hurley; every Little Packrats bag is designed, printed, cut, and sewn by fair wage earning American employees.

Little Packrats backpacks are 15” wide x 15” high x 5” deep, nylon, waterproof, have extendable soft straps, and additional outside and inside pockets. Styles include Chloe the Cat, a fox design (coming soon) an owl design (coming soon) and Hunter the Dog. In addition to their regular school backpacks, Little Packrats has 3D backpacks which have made one aspect of the designed animal tangible. For instance, the bunny backpack has three-dimensional cloth ears, the duck has webbed feet, the dog has a three-dimensional dog tag, and the dinosaur has vertebrae spikes that stand out.

Pack the customers into your store with innovative totes from www.cbhstudio.com

One Fish, Two Fish, What’s the Dish on Redfish?

Hailing from Vancouver, Canada, Redfish Kids Clothing strives to create clothing which honors and celebrates the courageous, adventurous spirit of children. In order to do this, Redfish Kids Clothing is crafted specifically to compliment and support a child’s growth and various movement needs. Redfish clothing is locally made, can be layered easily (pants can double as shorts, a dress can become a smock), and the materials used to make the garments are pre-washed and extremely resilient.

The clothing is available for infants, girls, and boys; each catalog of clothing exhibits strong, bright colors and proud patterns inspired by popular street fashions from China and Japan. This influence is particularly seen in the exquisitely designed Kimono and Mandarin style frocks for girls — perfect for back-to-school.

The girl’s line includes leggings, jeans, stunning butterfly blouses, jackets, vests, skirts, and dresses like the classy Newsprint Dress. For boys, the Karate Jeans are very sharp, as are the Simon Says Pants. A wide selection of hip T-shirts featuring trendy designs, such as peace signs and sock monkey patterns, are ideal for school and play and are popular with both parents and kids.

To catch the latest haul, surf over to www.redfishkidsclothing.com

Keepin’ Cold Lunch “Cool”

In the world of manufacturing, The Tin Box Company, located in NYC, definitely has some “street cred.” The company began in 1952 under another name and became The Tin Box Company of America, Inc. in 1980. The Tin Box Company has been producing great tin products ever since! Their tins are made with tinplated quality steel, premium inks, and 3-D embossing, so consumers can see in the very product why The Tin Box Company is the best.

As for what designs and styles they carry, a better question would be “what don’t they carry?” There are workman cases, carry-all boxes, hat boxes, lunch boxes… and the list goes on. As for designs, buyers can pick from Toy Story, Coca-Cola, Strawberry Shortcake, Disney, Star Wars (there are tins shaped like the heads of Darth Vader, a Storm Trooper, and R2D2), Transformers 1 & 2, Sesame Street, Hello Kitty, Spiderman, Dora the Explorer, Bakugan, and more. Not only that, but the Tin Box Company can specially design a tin to meet a company’s request!

The Tin Box Company sells tins starting in groups of six for $28.50. Orders ship in five to seven days.

Give tin a spin at www.tinboxco.com

PB GREEN is a Natural Choice

Paige Baran decided to do some math. If she and her husband used at three plastic bags a day for their lunch, five days a week, fifty weeks in a year, this would equal 750 total plastic bags thrown in the trash. For, say, a family of four people, the amount of annual waste would equal 3,000 bags!

Using the sewing machine she received years ago from her mother, Baran created a better system in the form of reusable snack bags and sandwich wraps and used her invention to pack her husband’s and her own lunches. When colleagues started to inquire about purchasing the wraps for themselves, Baran realized she had a potential business on her hands, and PB GREEN — which stands for “please be green” — was born.

PB Green bags and wraps are cotton with a waterproof lining, and are sealed by Velcro. The products do not contain DEHP, phlalates, or BPA plasticizers. To clean them, simply shake the wraps free of crumbs, wipe with a wet cloth, and hang dry them.

As for patterns, the wraps and bags come in the following design options: The Autobahn (cars), Sock Monkeys, Plaids in the Mix, Caribbean Garden Wrap Set, Bright Owls Wrap Set, Night Owl Wrap Set, Eastern Influence, Blue Paisley Wrap Set, Into the Woods, and Lavender Love Wrap Set. Each set is reasonable priced at $24.00. All PB GREEN products are proudly made in the USA.

Healthy lunches are all wrapped up with eco-friendly products from www.pbgreenbags.com