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Playtime prompts business idea for mother

3 min read
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Rowan and Callum Pollock play with their Bramble Box ice cream shop.

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Rowan, Morna and Callum Pollock

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Rowan Pollock dons her hat to play with the Bramble Box ice cream shop.

For anyone who’s worried that kids don’t use their imaginations enough these days, meet Morna Pollock.

The Upper St. Clair mother of two always has looked for alternatives to her children, say, spending their time sitting in front of the TV or computer.

“My kids, they are creative. They love to play,” she said. “I’m spending a lot of time coming up with ideas of how to entertain them, so I started making up these kits.”

The kits, chock full of various odds and ends repurposed as playthings, have evolved into what Pollock calls Bramble Boxes and to what she has turned into a home-based business, marketing them for parents who want to entertain and educate their youngsters in a similarly creative manner.

“The first thing I made was a post office kit,” she recalled. “It was just basic household items, like a note pad and envelopes, and I printed off some little stamps.”

Son Callum, now 6, and daughter Rowan, 3, enjoyed the experience so much that she came up with other ideas, such as a detective kit, complete with Sherlock Holmes hats and magnifying glasses.

Eventually, Pollock thought others might benefit from her ideas, and she launched the Bramble Box business.

“The principle behind it is simple,” she explained. “It’s the time it takes to put these things together that people often don’t have. People are working; they’re running to activities. I figure if I’m doing it, I can save other people time, and they can just buy a kit ready-made.”

Customers can purchase the kits, designed for children ages 3 to 8, one at a time or on a subscription basis, receiving new ones with a new theme each month. July’s Bramble Box, for example, is an ice cream shop, with everything from play money and menus to petite pompons replicating the cold confections.

Pollock said she strives to include in each kit “a lot of things that can be reused or recycled or repurposed in some way, so that it’s not just a box of junk arriving every month. No one wants a box of junk.”

Plenty of people want Bramble Boxes, as the number of orders continues to increase.

“At first it was slow, because I didn’t have a whole lot of money behind me for marketing,” Pollock explained. “So it was all organic growth.”

Her way of getting the word out is online, especially through the network of “mom bloggers” who support one another across cyberspace. She often sends sample Bramble Boxes to bloggers for their perusal and review.

“It’s impartial,” Pollock said about the writeups. “You read posts where they’re not so complimentary about other things. It’s an honest account of it from other moms who are using it from their children. It’s fantastic marketing.”

Perhaps reminiscent of Dr. Seuss, the Bramble Box is named after a fox.

Pollock said she pictured the animal for a logo, but she’s not good at graphic arts. Her friend Cara Wetzel is, and she came up with a design.

“In my mind, the fox was called Bramble,” Pollock said.

Whatever the name, Callum Pollock likes how the boxes spark his creativity.

“The more imagination you have, the more fun you have,” he said. “And when you get bigger, you can have more memories of having fun when you were little.”

For more information, visit www.brambleboxprops.com.

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