This year, and in particular this summer, marks a pretty big milestone for Mastermind Toys... we have been in business for 25 years! The company was started by brothers Jon and Andy Levy in 1984 in a tiny little store in North Toronto (close to where our flagship store currently resides on Yonge St.) Originally Mastermind began as an educational software store, and it gradually morphed into the fun toy company that it is today, focusing on the very best in quality toys and books. There are now 11 stores across Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area, and we have www.MastermindToys.com as Canada's premier toy store. Not bad, no?

SO... it is our 25th birthday this year! And since we are the birthday specialists (ask any parent: our free gift wrapping in-store and online make us a great last-minute stop for presents!) we thought that we'd better put together some birthday fun!

We'll be having all kinds of birthday fun this year, but to kick off the celebrations we're having an event in our stores on Saturday June 20th.

Here's the plan:

First and foremost, any good birthday celebration has to have good sweets... and so we're going to have delicious, melt-in-your-mouth, made-with-the-best-chocolate (and even CARAMEL!) gourmet chocolate chip cookies from Robyn's Cookies, the best cookie people in Toronto! Our friends over at SavvyMom did a great write-up on these cookies (and have a mouth-watering picture of a stack of cookies)... read it here.

We're also going to have a really cool gift with purchase running that day: if you spend $25 on ANYTHING in store ($1 for each year!) you'll get a free commemorative colour-your-own T-shirt kit, a $15 value. The T-shirt will be covered in a fun design featuring our Mastermind characters, and here's the really cool part: it's washable, and you can colour it over and over! It comes with special markers that wash out each time, so every time that you wear it you can colour it in a different way and have a whole new shirt! Very cool.

In addition to this the shirt will come with a coupon that you can use for $5 off a $25 purchase (there's the 25 thing again) at Mastermind this July. So for a $25 purchase you get a $15 T-shirt kit and a $5 coupon... not bad at all!

We're going to be sending out en eUpdate with the FULL details the week before the event, so make sure that you're signed up to receive our eUpdates!

And I'm not going to lie to you: Robyn from Robyn's cookies sent over a basket of "sample" cookies for us here to "test" to "make sure that we like them for the event." We get pretty excited about toys here at the office but we basically became jackals for those cookies. Like in nature videos. Holy cow they are good.

Stay tuned for more info on this and other Birthday celebrations!!

--Ryan the Toy Buyer