MindWare: Putting a Spin on Traditional Puzzle Play

by Michelle Johnson

Puzzle lovers will delight in MindWare’s newest lines of Peaceable Kingdom puzzles. “Customers love our unique puzzles, and I’m excited for them to experience our newest launches,” says Kristin Gallagher, MindWare’s director of product development.

New to the market, Puzzlescopes take traditional puzzles in a whole new direction – a circular one! They have three different sizes of round pieces and a suction cup to spin and position the pieces into place. “This unique puzzle is great for family time,” says Kristin. “The varying sizes of the circular pieces make it ideal for all ages and skill levels to complete together.”

Peaceable Kingdom’s new Seek and Find Glow puzzles provide a fun and interactive way for kids to engage with a puzzle even after completion. Once assembled, the reveal light illuminates more than 40 glow-in-the-dark objects for eagle-eye explorers to find.

Scratch and Sniff stickers have been popular for decades, so Scratch and Sniff puzzles are the perfect combination of two childhood classics! The brand’s eight multisensory puzzles come in themes like Candy Kingdom, Fruity Fairy, and Sweet Smells Bakery. Not only fun and engaging to put together, the final scene is a delight when the puzzle is complete.

Even traditional styles like floor puzzles and shaped puzzles are anything but ordinary at MindWare. “We hire artists from all over the world with a wide variety of styles, so each puzzle has its own look with art that is compelling for both kids and adults,” explains Kristin. “And, as with all our brands, the puzzles are always made from high quality materials – a must for kids who love to play with them time and time again.”

A childhood favorite, floor puzzles are Peaceable Kingdom’s best-selling puzzles with vibrant art and distinctive shapes and pieces that set them apart. They also help little learners with recognition, fine-motor skills, and problem solving. With more than a dozen styles to choose from, each is designed with a storage box and corded handle for small hands to easily carry and clean up. The fun doesn’t stop there, though. Shaped puzzles, wooden puzzles and even bath puzzles are all part of Peaceable Kingdom’s unique line. Regardless of the style, puzzles are a perfect way to get kids thinking while having a lot of fun. They provide hands-on play, challenge children of all ages and developmental levels, and give hand-eye coordination and critical thinking skills a boost.

To learn more about these exclusive puzzle designs from MindWare, visit mwwholesale.biz or email info@mwwholesale.biz.

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The Original Specialty Toy Magazine since 1994 in precise quantity. Every day, we drive by giant signs that offer us a current quotation, down to one one tenth of a cent.

These days, there is another element to the gas-price issue as well. Transportation is the biggest emitter of carbon in the United States, contributing about 29 percent of all greenhouse gases. Cars and trucks account for the majority of those emissions, which makes them a target in the effort to slow climate change.

Ten years ago there were virtually no all-electric vehicles on the road in this country. In 2020 they made up 2 percent of vehicle sales, which is expected to exceed 4 percent this year, and to continue to double every couple of years through the next decade.

The trend is not really being driven by consumers, who still tend to fear the newer technology, but more by government, corporations and the carmakers themselves. Each of those players has its own motivations.

The carmakers simply see the handwriting on the wall. They know EVs will eventually dominate auto sales, and that the real question is who is going to build them. The upstarts like Tesla, Fisker and Rivian have a head start, and support from Wall Street, but the legacy brands have name recognition, dealer networks and manufacturing capacity.

They will need all of that, plus an enormous amount of capital. Ford alone is putting $11.4 billion into plants in Kentucky and Tennessee that will build EVs and the batteries that run them.

One of the vehicles that will be manufactured there is the electric version of the world’s most popular truck, the F-150. Ford stopped taking orders for the new “Lightening” when it hit 200,000, which is the most the company can possibly build in the next two years. It is just one of 40 new EVs that will come online by the end of 2022.

Many of the vehicles will be snapped up by corporate fleets. A survey last fall of 28 major companies showed that they planned to purchase nearly 400,000 EVs over the next five years. Corporations are seeing a significant benefit to their bottom lines due to lower operating costs and less maintenance. No doubt they will also be quick to claim credit for their environmental commitment.

It is up to government, however, to take the lead in reducing carbon emissions, because the other sectors will tend to act in their own short-term self interest. To that end, the federal government has long sponsored a $7,500 tax credit on the purchase of a rechargeable, battery-dependent vehicles, and Congress is negotiating with itself on an additional $4,000 incentive on union-made EVs assembled in the United States.

Probably more significant, the so-called infrastructure bill includes the funding of a nationwide network of EV charging stations. It will be up to the states to “strategically deploy” the stations.

One of the first toys I remember from my childhood was a racetrack with two cars that were powered by electricity that was run through the track itself. Recently I read in the paper that one state is looking to do the same thing with real roads and real cars.

It strikes me as ironic that we used to build models of internal combustion cars and power them with electricity. Perhaps now we can build models of electric vehicles and make them rechargeable.

So, what does all this have to do with the price of gasoline? Well, eventually it will reduce demand, which should drive down prices. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to ride it out.