News

It's almost Back to School Time!  Stop into our store for Back to School savings and for our in-store drawing for a Backpack loaded with school supplies!  No purchase necessary!  :)

It was a great night at the 4-H Animal Auction held at the Manistee County Fair last night, August 15th, 2024! For the second year in a row, we are proud to have been able to be the winning bidder (along with our friends Erika & Tim Elliott at Elliott's Pumping service) on another cow from this hard-working young man, Nolan Koscinski! We love knowing where our food comes from and that it was raised humanely.

Supporting these kids in our local 4-H programs help promote the future of local agriculture, animal husbandry, and helps teach our kids about responsibility and hard work. 4-H is about so much more than just "raising animals".....if you take a walk through the exhibit barn at the fair, you'll see photography, knitting, laser engraving, crafting and other projects that kids have worked on this year. Please consider joining us in supporting these programs!    

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Our daughter, Annabelle, has been involved in 4-H for 7 years now, and has been marketing a pig at the Manistee County Fair in Onekama for the last several summers.  Stop in at the Live Animal Auction on Thursday, August 15th at 5:30 at the Manistee Fair to see the animals up for auction!  Last year, Annabelle's pig sold to the generous buyers at Manistee Meijer!

Well, it's official!  We are now in the FRONT of the building at 401 Main Street in downtown Frankfort, and we now have 3,000 sq feet of retail space which is 4x increase for us!   We've done some deep spring cleaning, gotten some new signage (thanks to DA Designs and VanBrocklin CNC from Frankfort!) and we have added a ton of new lines to our store.   

 

We still will carry convenience items, Hallmark greeting cards, and we've added tons of new Locally-Made Gifts, Souvenirs, and toy lines like BRIO Trains, Douglas stuffed animals, Juratoys/Janod, Nee-Doh, Spy Labs, and more!!  

 

Some locally made items include CNC fire pits by VanBrocklin CNC, lavender products from Cherry Hill Lavender LLC, Gwen Frostic Prints, Sleeping Bear Honey items, Cherry Republic, and more!

Stay tuned for more news!

Big Changes are in store for The Corner Toy Store in Q1 2024!   We're THRILLED to be moving to the FRONT of our current building, where we'll have TONS more space to display merchandise!  Same address as before (401 Main St, Frankfort MI 49635) but we'll be in the big front-end of the store instead of our old space in the back:)  Stay tuned for more fun and exciting news, including some added toy lines and services!

In 2005, Ben and Amy MacRae started a small Ebay store to sell some retired Playmobil sets online.  Ben and his younger siblings had been Playmobil fans when they were young, and they had started carrying the line in their family store in Frankfort in the late 90s.   Ben remembers "It was just after Halloween, and we had some current Advent Calendars and Nativity Sets on the shelf, along with some discontinued tractors and farm animal sets.   We put 5 or 6 items on Ebay one night, and by the next day, they had sold.  We put another half-dozen sets online, and again, within a day they were gone.  We quickly ordered some more product in, and between Halloween and Christmas, we grew our Playmobil sales 10x!"    In 2006 and 2007, they kept growing the business as fast as they could, and in January 2009 they emptied out the storage area at the rear of the store building and they renovated it into a retail space.  May 2008 saw the Grand Opening of the Corner Toy Store's dedicated space in Downtown Frankfort.   Online sales were expanded to Walmart and Amazon in the 'teens, and then in 2020, sales shot up 400% during the Pandemic.  When so many parents and their kids around the world were stuck at home, they turned to toys and games to occupy much of their time.  "Christmas 2020 was so busy online that we had our packing "elves" packing and shipping toys from tables we had set up in the back of the store because we were just simply out-of-space to ship from!"   .... to be continued!