Karen Liu began her online business in 1999 at a time when the video game business was booming.
“I thought I could sell something online,” Liu said. “I saw a lot of people playing video games and the business developed so fast.”
She said she added toys for grade schoolers in her virtual store – www.toysdiva.com – when smart phones began being used to play games.
But last Saturday Liu went back to the future by expanding into an actual store called Toysdiva at 1010A Jericho Turnpike in New Hyde Park.
“We wanted to expand from online to open a store and see how it goes,” she said.
Liu said she the actual and virtual stores carry a similar inventory but believes Toysdiva will draw different types of customers than her online business.
Online customers, she said, are typically parents shopping for their children. In the store, the customer driving the sale is a child accompanied by his or her parents.
“You’re physically seeing the toys, so they’re more attractive,” Liu said.
Liu has partnered with her husband, Kam Cheung, in Toysdiva while remainting the sold owner www.toysdiva.com.
Liu, who lives with her husband and two sons, Damian and Ethan, in Great Neck considered other locations for the store, including Great Neck and Flushing, but the rent was less expensive in New Hyde Park. Liu said she also noticed kids in the area where she located the store, attending classes at Mathnasium and visiting Catalano Music.
As in her online business, the store carries U.S. made products from Mattel and Funko Pop figurines, and the standards like Super Mario, Disney characters, Barbie dolls, the Smurfs and Pokemon. The Toysdiva store also carries Marvel and D.C. Comics collectible figures, which she previously added in a third phase of expansion on her web site.
“It’s fun. There are so many new things and the kids like them,” Liu said.
Liu migrated to the U.S. from China in 1985.
She enrolled in Queens College and graduated with an accounting degree in 1997. She then worked for a Manhattan accounting firm, but soon decided to start her own business.
While at Queens College, she met her husband, an art major, who migrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. 20 years ago.
Before recently becoming a partner in his wife’s toy business, Cheung was a web designer and had built his wife’s website when she started the online business.
Now he said he’s enjoying being in the toy business.
“When I see kids playing with their toys, I feel happy myself,” he said.
Already members of the Greater New Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce, they said the store is a “totally new concept” for them. But Liu said she’s thinking about eventually opening a second location in the Roosevelt Field Shopping Center.
