(English) Best Practices

Jiminy Eco Toys is an eco-specialist toy company, retailing and distributing the earth-kindest toys across Ireland & the UK.

Named after Pinocchio's conscience Jiminy Cricket, it's the brainchild of Dublin mum Sharon Keilthy. Sharon found toy shopping for her daughter frustrating. Nearly everything was plastic wrapped in plastic, shipped 22,000km from China. So in 2018 Sharon left her senior role at an American multinational and set up Jiminy to give eco-minded customers more options.

Sharon says: "My vision is an eco-section in every toyshop. I want to do something for the environment. Instead of complaining about how eco-unfriendly toys are, I figured, why not use my business experience and be the toy company I hope the others will become? This is my eco-activism, activism through business."

Products & Services. This removes Plastics from an industry that uses an enormous amount of plastic. A start-up with an ingrained Eco purpose. Sustainability runs through their business plan and marketing efforts.

Supply Chain integrity: we answer 25 questions about every product – where it was made, what from, how it’s packed, etc; and about 5% of our products are ‘imperfect’ by our eco standards (e.g., they’re shrinkwrapped) – our website flags these IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Greenwashing is the opposite to what we do!

My Engineering degree and my years in consulting set me up to research and understand the climate and environmental science relating to products. So when we stock an “eco” toy, it is scientifically “eco”, and we can explain that in very easy, relatable terms to our community.

I invested my life savings to start Jiminy – we’re a self-funded social enterprise (a business whose primary reason for existence is to solve a social problem). I took a “do experiments and learn” approach so started on a dark November morning in my local park market, with a table and 20 products (we now have over 750!). Every order from Jiminy is one more sustainable toy, one fewer unsustainable toy, in the world.

We have a Shopify website and do all the IT ourselves – off the shelf apps are so good these days you can get to “really rather good” without custom coding – in fact, our DIY website won 2nd-best small business website of the year 2021 with Digital Business Ireland

Fail fast! Do the experiments that really test whether your business is going to work in the first few months – because if it’s not going to work you want to know ASAP!

Write a business plan, assemble an advisory board, and manage it strategically from the start (rather than getting caught-up in day to day everything at the expense of that).

Sourced: 30/6/23 https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/articles/my-business-life-sharon-keilthy-jiminy-eco-toys/

Sourced 30/6/23: https://jiminy.ie/