A family distributor, three toy chains and a new name.

Noodle Kidoodle grew out of an older family business. Publishers Weekly reported in May 2000 that the company had been founded in the early 1930s as Greenman Bros., a business that distributed toys, housewares, stationery and other general products. English Wikipedia dates the business to 1931 as the Star Trading Company and to 1946 as Greenman Bros. Inc., and places its headquarters in Farmingdale, New York, on Long Island.

The Dallas Business Journal named Stanley Greenman as the founder of Noodle Kidoodle in a profile published on 15 March 1998. The paper reported that he had earlier operated the toy chains Circus World, Play World and Playland through Greenman Brothers, the New York company founded by his father and uncles, and it described him as Noodle Kidoodle’s chairman and chief executive. Noodle Kidoodle was a new name from the same family.

Publishers Weekly dates the first Noodle Kidoodle store to November 1993, and English Wikipedia places it in Greenvale, New York. In December 1995, Wikipedia says, Greenman Bros. Inc. changed its own name to Noodle Kidoodle Inc., so the parent company took the name of its shops. Publishers Weekly says the company went public in 1996, and the Dallas Business Journal recorded its shares trading on Nasdaq under the ticker NKID in 1998.

The name is a piece of nonsense verse. Noodle Kidoodle rhymes twice over, borrowing “noodle”, an informal word for the head, and folding it into a sing-song second word, so a sign could be read aloud like a nursery rhyme.

Non-violent toys, new markets and a sale to Zany Brainy.

The chain set itself apart from its owners’ older toy businesses by what it chose not to sell. The Dallas Business Journal reported in 1998 that Noodle Kidoodle differed from traditional chains such as Circus World through its emphasis on educational and non-violent toys, and quoted Greenman telling shoppers looking for a Power Ranger that they would have to look elsewhere. He told the paper that much of the merchandise was not available at the major retail chains and that the company chose products by how they influenced a child’s mind rather than by the advertising and promotional support they received on commercial television.

In the same report the company’s chief financial officer, Kenneth Betuker, described plans for its first stores in the Southwest, in Plano and Dallas, with further Texas cities, among them Austin, Houston and San Antonio, in view. Betuker told the paper that the Dallas area had a fairly high concentration of well-educated, affluent customers of the kind who appreciated what the stores did. By then, the paper said, the chain had stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. English Wikipedia lists stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas over the life of the chain.

On 24 April 2000 Zany Brainy, a rival chain run from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, announced that it would buy Noodle Kidoodle. The New York Times reported the following day that the combined chain would operate under the Zany Brainy name and that the deal still needed shareholder and regulatory approval. Publishers Weekly reported that the new company would be headquartered in Zany Brainy’s offices, that every store would be called Zany Brainy, and that the Noodle Kidoodle shops would be rebranded by the fourth quarter of 2000. The magazine noted that both chains sold a mix of toys, games, books and videos, with Zany Brainy giving more weight to books than Noodle Kidoodle did. It added that the merged company intended to keep Noodle Kidoodle’s warehouses in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and Nashville, Tennessee.

English Wikipedia gives 2000 as the year Noodle Kidoodle ended as a separate chain. What followed belongs to the buyer’s story: Wikipedia says Zany Brainy filed for Chapter 11 protection in May 2001 and sold its assets to The Right Start later that year, and Playthings reported in December 2003 that Zany Brainy’s later parent, FAO Inc., planned to liquidate the Zany Brainy stores.

Design and documentation.

A toy store’s identity is rarely carried by a single object. It sits in the sign above the door, in the lettering on a shopping bag, in a printed catalogue that arrives before the holidays and, for some chains, in a mascot drawn to be recognised by children before they can read the name beside it. Each of those pieces is made to be seen at a different distance — across a car park, on a shelf, at a kitchen table — and each tends to be redrawn as owners, formats and printing methods change.

Many toy-store names have also outlived the shops that first carried them. A name can pass through mergers, administrations and sales, and may return as a website, a brand licensed to another retailer or a section inside a larger store, so the mark a shopper sees today may belong to a different company from the one that opened the original branches.

Each guide in this group separates what independent, dated sources record from what a company says about itself: who opened the first store and when, who has owned the name since, what became of the shops, and how the signs, bags, catalogues and characters have been drawn — marking plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A rhyme, a slogan and a sign that was taken down.

The Noodle Kidoodle identity rests on its name, a double rhyme meant to be said out loud, and the shops it hung over. The company’s 1995 decision to rename the whole business after the shops made the name the company’s public face as well as its store sign.

The family history behind it is part of the identity too. The Dallas Business Journal set the new chain against the Greenmans’ earlier toy businesses, Circus World, Play World and Playland, and the paper located the difference in the merchandise. The company’s chairman described choosing toys by their effect on a child rather than by television advertising, and the name and slogan carried that position onto the shopfront.

The name ended with a rebranding. When Zany Brainy bought the company in 2000, Publishers Weekly reported that the Noodle Kidoodle shops would take the Zany Brainy name by the fourth quarter of that year.

For a design guide, Noodle Kidoodle shows how a family business with a long history in toys could launch a new name for a new kind of shop, give the parent company that name, and then see it folded into a rival’s sign. Compare it with Zany Brainy, the chain that bought it in 2000, and FAO Schwarz, which later shared Zany Brainy’s parent company. For this guide we use kidoodle green, tomato red and sunny yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Noodle Kidoodle’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.