Every toy founder is familiar with the rollercoaster of toy tradeshows. You spend months and a small fortune getting ready for ASTRA or Toy Fair. You have four incredible days of conversations with stores of all sizes and can’t believe how much interest there is in your brand. Then you go home, with your adrenaline on another planet and a few days later you hit the post-show crash.

After four days surrounded by your toy people, the quiet or chaos of home-life can be jarring. Your leads are cooling off and the momentum is waning. Your next show is months away and you aren’t quite sure what you should be doing until then.

Those in between show moments, is why I built Toy Matchmaker.

Outside of toy tradeshows I noticed that my students and clients were struggling to find the right retailers to carry their product. It was like death by a thousand tabs. The process usually goes something like this: 

First, you start searching Google for stores in your hometown because it’s always easier to start somewhere you can visit in real life. 

Second, you cross reference your ASTRA membership list because if they’re a member (like you), you’ve already found common ground and your opener. 

Third, you dig through your CRM and your gmail to see whether you’ve talked to them before. 

Fourth, you pull up a trends article to see if there’s a pitch angle that aligns with whatever is going on in the toy industry right now. With all that in your head, you hunt for your sell sheet and catalog.

By the time you’ve dropped all of those notes into your custom excel sheet, your context switching has cost you an hour, zapped your energy and stolen your focus.

Toy Matchmaker is one tool that does all that work for you (and more), in one place. This tool uses AI and U.S. Census data to match your product to real, verified stores, tells you exactly why each one is a fit, and hands you a pitch grounded in the actual reason that store and your product belong together. With one click you can draft persuasive pitches and unlock a leads email, social media contact, phone number, Linked In and more. You can finally stop juggling five or six tools and start working from one, so the time you'd have spent hunting for just 1 lead goes into actually pitching 10.

The thing I’m proudest of is that this app encourages focused and intentional store pitching, as opposed to the all too common mass marketing blasts to whoever will listen.

Toy Matchmaker is built on a belief: 20% of your effort should yield 80% of your results. Finding a lead and knowing the reasons why your product is a fit, shouldn't consume your week, it should take minutes, so most of your energy goes where only you can add value, into perfecting the pitch and establishing the relationship.

Get creative with how you use our matching algorithm.

In June 2026, I attended ASTRA in Milwaukee, WI to help several of my clients land retail placement. Before the show, I used Toy Matchmaker to find ASTRA stores within a 250-mile radius of the Baird Convention Center in Milwaukee that were a high percentage match for my clients products. My strategy was pretty simple, those retailers were more likely to take a drive or a short flight to attend ASTRA Marketplace & Academy that year. If they were that close and a match for my clients products, they were more likely to attend. So, I used this digital, AI driven tool to pull their contact information in about 10 minutes.

Then I mailed physical, wedding style invitations letting those retailers know that they were matched with a product that will be at ASTRA along with our booth number. I was even able to include specific reasons on why each product was a good fit for that particular store, on the cards themselves. It was targeted, it was personal, and it worked, because the tool did the tedious part so I could spend my time on the personalized pitch.

Here are a few of the things smart brands can do inside the app.

Connect your Faire account. Add your Faire URL to your product and brand profiles, so buyers who already shop on Faire can move straight from discovering you to ordering you. You meet them where they already buy.

Bring in your sales rep. When you grow to the point of having a sales rep, you can link them to your account so they run searches on your behalf. This is where the tool becomes a genuine innovation for our industry: a rep and a brand working from the same intelligent search, the same store matches, the same pitch history, instead of a scattered chain of emails and spreadsheets.

Let the AI write the first draft. Your match score isn’t just a vanity number! Our matching algorithm analyzes demographic data, pricepoint, consumer insights, and product detail so that your pitches are targeted, store and product specific, and persuasive. Plus, if you can edit and send your pitches without even leaving the app!

Catherine Tenaglia, of Race to Stupid Games was an early adopter of Toy Matchmaker and called it “a time saver,” she told me, “I'm finding so many quality leads and saving countless hours.” Jennifer Oz of Olympia Dolls said she “found the store search extremely valuable at uncovering leads.” This tool is giving you back time, momentum and motivation to keep pitching your brand so you can grow your sales.

▶  See Toy Matchmaker in action: book a live demo

Building this tool has been my most exciting work over the past year. I launched my company, Forge & Wade, to make apps both inside and outside the toy industry, and Toy Matchmaker is our flagship. I'm honored that it's a 2026 Women in Toys “Wonder Women” finalist for Emerging Technology Leader, for my previous work around AI in the toy industry and now my work building Toy Matchmaker.

Are you looking to grow your retail sales?

On August 10th, we're opening a Retail Challenge, built specifically for startup toy brands trying to get into toy stores. If you've never landed a retailer, or you're staring down your first show and don't know where to start, this is for you. Everyone who joins gets three months of Toy Matchmaker at our Growth tier, enough runway to find your stores, pitch them, and get in front of buyers.

Spots are limited, and the only way in is the waitlist. If getting into retail is your goal this year, add your name now at thetoymatchmaker.com/challenge, before the doors open on the 10th.

Toy Matchmaker - Your next best seller is one match away.