Our Story
Snowtime Anytime! What a great idea! What a great product! What great FUN! What great exercise without knowing it! What great gifts they make! What great stress relieving fun! What great decorating fun! We could go on and on and on about our new product! So we would like to tell you our story.
We are Juanita and Dianne, mother and daughter, and the idea of Snowtime Anytime! all started with a party. Dianne has 3 daughters, Hadley, Maggie and Abbey who have always enjoyed hosting, long, big Christmas parties and having friends over. At this particular Christmas party with about 40 children we had gone thru all of the scheduled games, etc and found they had gone quicker than expected and we still had an hour to go. You could see that big "B" word starting to erupt - the word mom's hate to hear - "bored". Well, we were pretty creative with these parties, but this looked a little scary. So we are walking around the house deliberating on what to do when in the utility room we spotted a large bag of batting or pillow stuffing, I immediately smiled and turned to Dianne and saw it in her eyes. We simultaneously thought of an indoor snowball fight! We grabbed the stuffing and tore it into small pieces and rolled it into balls as best we could with that type of material. We took it into the family room and started throwing it at the kids and they went wild! An hour later they were still throwing snowballs, laughing and giggling. As they started filing out the door, all you could hear was, "best party ever!' "I had sooo much fun", "great party", "I don't want to leave", etc.
With the party over, Dianne and I, once again looked at each other with the "entrepreneur bug", we knew we had something here once again. And let us explain that one.
In 1996 we invented a popular national product called "The Original Lightcicles." The Wall Street Journal documented us as "the inventors of Icicle Lights." The Original Lightcicles were around for about 4 years until the cheaper knock-offs flooded the market. The cheaper ones never looked as rich and nice as our product. Now, icicle style lights have become seasonal fixtures.We were the recipients of the Noel Associations prestigious "Christmas Product of the Year" award in a dazzling ceremony held in New York City where we accepted the award beating out such companies as Sylvania, Westinghouse, Phillips and other major companies. What fun and excitement that was! And The Original Lightcicles came about quite accidentally also. We owned a small gift shop which set back off the road a bit and customers were always commenting on it being hard to find, so we went out one evening on the front porch of the store to try to come up with something more noticable. We grabbed strings of lights and a staple gun and came up with hanging the lights vertically instead of horizonally to get an icicle look. It was dazzling and very eye catching. We were flooded with interest on how we hung the lights. And we thought, there is something here! So we designed a strip that could be installed on a building on the soffitt. This kept the lights from blowing up on the roof, plus the strips never had to be taken down. So all a person had to do was hang the lights each year and they could make them as long and lush as they wanted. You could essentially create your own design with the lights. What an adventure! We could write a book on that episode in our lives.
But, back to Snowtime Anytime! So with the contacts we had from The Original Lightcicle days we took off on our new adventure! We knew our snowballs had to have the right texture and feel as similar to snow as possible and without the wet and cold but, white as snow. As moms, we wanted a "no muss, no fuss, no slush" indoor product that could also be machine wash, gentle cycle and machine dry, light cycle.The snowballs also had to be indoor friendly, not hurting or harming objects, gentle in the house. And we did it!
We were sooo excited when our 2 - 40' ocean containers arrived in the USA. 291,200 indoor snowballs! Fun! Fun! Fun! Smiles and giggles! 11,000 bags of indoor snowballs!
We filled orders and took Snowtime Anytime to the Christmas Gift and Hobby Show in Indianapolis,Indiana where we had a special demonstration area filled with 1,000 snowballs next to our sales booth where customers could go in and have snowball fights. What a time everybody had! Young and old alike loved them! Customers were buying them for immediate good times, Christmas presents, sending them to soldiers , schools, nursing homes, one gentleman bought them for his boardroom! Great stress reliever! you can decorate with them. Snowtime Anytime is a triple purpose item. We won 1st place among over 360 vendors. We were featured on the news, in the newspaper, etc.
Snowtime Anytime is about Fun and exercise! Laughing and having a good time. Bringing back childhood memories for the older ones. Fun, new memories for the younger ones. Interacting with one another. Exercising! Stretch, move, bend, squat, stoop, jump, duck and dodge, laugh and enjoy and using your imagination!And adults, parents, grandparents, if you don't believe us, go ahead, get in that snowball fight with them, see how you feel after 15 minutes. Total workout! Shoot us a comment about your fun time! Happy snowballing!!
