Upper St. Clair entrepreneur earns Parents’ Choice Award
Rowan Pollock, 4, with her mother’s Bramble Box Pizzeria Pretend Play Activity Kit
Morna and Rowan Pollock
Rowan Pollock, 4, with her mother’s award-winning Bramble Box Pizzeria Pretend Play Activity Kit
Morna Pollock with children Callum and Rowan
Kids, as anyone who’s old enough to remember Art Linkletter knows, say the darnedest things.
“Does Mrs. Pollock work for Santa?” a child asked his mother after a visit to what matched the visions dancing in his head of Mr. Claus’ workshop.
Without the elves or extremely northerly address, Morna Pollock does something comparable to the jolly guy in the red suit: She makes toys and distributes them.
What the Upper St. Clair resident actually does is assemble educational play kits of her own concept and design, and she saves on reindeer feed by shipping the packages to parents.
Christmas arrived a bit off-season for Pollock when she learned recently that one of her kits has earned a Parents’ Choice Award, meaning that experts affiliated with the Parents’ Choice Foundation selected the product as among the best toys on the market for American children.
Rather than milk and cookies, the award winner focuses on another food favorite: It’s the Pizzeria Pretend Play Activity Kit, which Pollock chose among her offerings to submit to the foundation.
“It’s a simple box, but the educational value in it is strong,” she said. “It’s one of our boxes that really promotes math.”
The pizzeria kit includes menus with prices to help youngsters learn about addition, and it also promotes a somewhat more complex mathematical concept.
“Our pizzas were designed so they can be ‘cut,’ so you can do fractions,” Pollock said, explaining that kids can “order” whole, half or quarter pies. “It’s like learning without knowing you’re learning.”
She has learned plenty since launching Bramble Box – the name of her business is based on a cartoon fox that also serves as the logo – in November 2014. Each month, she develops a new kit to send to subscribers, which can be a bit of a challenge.
“I do a lot of research online, and I try everything on my kids, friends’ kids, and then I tweak it,” Pollock said about the process of coming up with viable themes, and she’ll be the first to admit: “There are some things I come up with that don’t work.”
Her growing customer base is a prime indicator that most of her ideas turn out just fine. Consider the June offering: a meteorologist box.
“Basically, you make your own weather station,” she said, and the components that come with it also contain a high degree of educational value.
Pollock also has learned that social media can be extremely useful for a 21st-century entrepreneur.
“It’s been primarily our driving force,” she explained. “We’re getting most of our traffic through ‘mommy’ blogs, and fathers, too.”
The bloggers may want to note that she strives to include only American-made products in the Bramble Box kits. The play pizzas, for example, come from a small, family-owned New Jersey. And the boxes, themselves, are made from 100 percent recycled material by an Illinois company.
“It does make it more pricey for me,” Pollock said, “but I think it’s worth it.”
What’s really worth it to her, as far as Bramble Box is concerned, is the opportunity to work closely with her children. Callum, 7, and Rowan, 4, along with their playmates, provide for a ready-made focus group as Pollock develops her products.
“They’re my first port of call for everything, mostly because they’re in that age range,” she said about the target audience for the kits.
Callum has been especially enthusiastic.
“He came in the other night and said to me, ‘Mom, I’m really proud of you with your business,'” Pollock related. “And he keeps talking about when he’s going to start his own business.”
As for Rowan, she is somewhat shy about saying a whole lot to journalists. But she did reveal her favorite aspect of the Bramble Boxes:
“I like playing with them.”
For more information, visit www.brambleboxprops.com.