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Amazon’s apparent decision to quietly do away with the ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ search options for toys has garnered praise from the team at Click-A-Brick, who say it’s another step toward the gender neutrality of toys.
As reported on the Toy News website last month, while Amazon didn’t make any kind of announcement about it, visitors to the retail site noticed the gender categories had disappeared from the toy search capabilities. Shoppers can still search via the other categories of ‘age range,’ ‘categories’ and ‘top brands’ and can also still search for the terms ‘girls toys’ and ‘boys toys’ to get results specifically tagged with those terms.
Amazon is not the first toy retailer to eradicate its ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ toy categories. Movements like Let Toys Be Toys, which advocates for the abolition of gender categories for toys, has recorded a significant drop in gender specific signage in many brick and mortar toy retailers.
This is good news for parents and toy companies, Click-A-Brick Co-Founders Jason Smith and Georg de Gorostiza say, but mostly it’s good news for children. The entrepreneurs say doing away with gender labeling will make parents feel less obligated to purchase certain toys for their children based on their gender and will make toy companies feel less obligated to specify a gender for their toys or make toys directed at one gender. And, children will be less swayed to choose one type of toy over another.
“We’ve always maintained that our sets are for either boys or girls because we want parents to consider them as essentially unisex toys,” Smith said. “The Animal Kingdom Safari set actually did better with girls than boys and we’re expecting our upcoming bird-themed set to do well with both girls and boys. But, we don’t just want to say the animal sets are unisex and the other ones are for boys. My daughters had a blast playing with both the Army Defenders and the Mighty Machines sets when we got them. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy any toy for them that they expressed a real interest in, even if it were in the ‘boys’ section. No child should be told that a toy isn’t for them because of labels that marketing departments put on them.”
Click-A-Brick has tentative plans to release a set that features a pink and pastel color theme along with items to build like unicorns and rainbows. However, the company cautions, this doesn’t mean the set is specifically a girls’ set.
“We want to cater to a large segment of children, and some of those children — regardless of whether they’re girls or boys — are going to be interested in the more pink unicorn end of the toy spectrum rather than the robot soldier end of the spectrum,” Smith said. “Again, it doesn’t matter to us which one a girl or boy is more drawn toward. We just want to put the options out there and let them decide.”
Release ID: 84203