Creative playthings are her work

Melissa Cohen
Designs educational toys for kids
MAJicCreative.com

I didn't think I'd be in the toy business my whole life," says Melissa Cohen. But as a creative who generates ideas and develops products for many toy companies, Cohen is all over the toy business. She's had a hand in creating at least 90 toys that will be on display in Manhattan in February at Toy Fair 2012 – 15 are debuts. The founder of MAJic Creative is a virtual idea-generating machine. But she's also a toy and packaging designer, product developer, and branding and marketing whiz.

Cohen's life in toys began at age 23 when she opened the South Street branch of the Last Wound-Up, a store peddling windup toys ranging in price from $2 to $10,000. Cohen ran the store for her uncle, who owned the Last Wound-Up chain. When the store closed, Cohen was recruited by Zany Brainy founder David Schlessinger to manage that company's first store in Wynnewood. She moved up the corporate chain quickly, promoted to buyer and then head of the company's product development department.

The toys Cohen developed for Zany and at MAJic are educational and focused on imaginative play. "I always said when I was a buyer for Zany Brainy that I'd quit the day they brought in Barbie," she says. "To me that represents mass market and not educational."

In her office on the second floor of her rowhouse in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood, Melissa Cohen is surrounded by prototypes and finished toys: giant double-sided foam puzzles, colorful hand puppets, dress-up kits, and stacker toys. The bookshelves hold 16 years' worth of hardbound notebooks filled with sketches and brainstorming notes. Ideas come to Cohen on trains, in coffee shops, while walking down the aisles of trade shows – anywhere but her office, where she gets too caught up with clients to properly inhabit a kid's state of mind. Her newest toy, Jabbers, was born at a trade show. Cohen picked up a little Asian snap purse from a vendor and started squeezing it open and shut. She immediately saw the potential for a whole line of characters. The idea for Unravels, her line of wax markers whose outer layer unravels to reveal secret messages, originated at a coffee shop. A friend brought a black China marker to a brainstorming meeting and asked, "How could we do these for kids?" On the train back home, Melissa thought of at least a hundred ways.