"Everyone has a favorite toy memory,” Kappa Toys founder Lizzy Newsome says, sipping from her churro latte at a table downstairs from her flagship store inside Fashion Show mall on the Las Vegas Strip. “I can’t think of a person I’ve talked to who doesn’t have at least one toy that they remember fondly,” she continues, “even if it’s something they got out of a gumball machine.”

For Newsome, it was a vintage Jem and the Holograms Hasbro doll—inspired by the animated ’80s TV show, not the movie, the anime fan points out. “I didn’t get the toy till I was an adult, but I watched the show as a kid. It was on reruns,” she remembers, “so the toy wasn’t available anymore when I was a kid. If I had it as a kid, I would’ve died.”

Newsome eventually found one, then went on to secure most of the rest of the Jem and the Holograms doll line in college. That collectors’ spirit helps explain why Newsome has been involved in the toy industry since 2006.

In 2014, Newsome moved to Las Vegas from Austin, Texas, with her husband Trevor Yopp to open Kappa Toys at Downtown Container Park. The pair have since closed that spot, executed a successful pop-up on the Linq Promenade, expanded to Fashion Show and, in May 2021, debuted an Area15 location featuring glow-in-the-dark merchandise.

It might sound reckless for an independent toy store to expand during an ongoing pandemic, but the numbers don’t lie: Toys are in high demand. Market research firm NPD Group reported a 13% increase in toy sales in 2021, and a surprising 16% uptick in 2020, as more families stayed home and received stimulus checks and child tax credits.

“The thing we really noticed coming out of the pandemic is, people are appreciating the things that are becoming more rare but that make them feel good,” Newsome says.

That isn’t to say independent toy stores haven’t struggled, and aren’t still. Supply chain issues, especially in the past year, have crushed small businesses’ ability to compete with big-name retailers. But Newsome says she and her husband got ahead of such issues by overstocking their warehouse with inventory. “I’m not saying we had everything we wanted,” she says, “but that was really what allowed us to grow so much last year.”

The pandemic pushed many toy consumers online, if they weren’t already. And with virtual retailers like Amazon dominating that marketspace, smaller businesses have been challenged to keep up.

“We definitely retooled our website during the pandemic to make ourselves more accessible,” Newsome says, explaining that Kappa even added items specifically requested by customers to its site—a service not typically offered by big-box stores. And, she says, “We still find that our customers prefer to come in person.”

As they peruse the 3,000-square-foot Fashion Show store, Rubik’s Cubes and NeeDoh stress balls stand out, but so do retro board games, hard-to-find puzzles and vintage robots and Pokémon cards. It’s like a time capsule filled with nostalgia.

“We’ve planned our store around awakening the kid in everyone,” Newsome says. “So an adult of any age who comes in is going to find something that may remind them of their childhood, whether they’re 25 or 75.”

Kappa has also fostered strong relationships with big-name Japanese brands like Hello Kitty creator Sanrio, Rilakkuma, Bandai Namco, Smiski and the Japanese-inspired Tokidoki. In Las Vegas, many of those products are sold exclusively at Kappa Toys. And customers from overseas have taken notice.

Newsome, who has been to Japan multiple times, recalls one customer telling her that the store reminded him of the famous five-story Japanese toy store Kiddy Land. Kappa draws lots of tourists, some of whom become regulars, visiting whenever in town and buying toys online when they’re not.

The beauty of brick-and-mortar isn’t just tactile; it’s personality. Kappa’s Area15 location stands out as a glowing cave of blacklight that could easily be an art installation. It’s one of the first spaces Ileana Drobkin and her children noticed when they toured the experiential hub during the holidays.

“They have a great setup,” says Drobkin, who now shops at Kappa’s Fashion Show location regularly. “There’s not a lot of toy stores around anymore that are just toy-centric, so that for me is a big appeal. It’s not a Target or a Walmart where there’s just a section. It’s all toys.”

Drobkin isn’t a collector, but says the store’s hand chairs and lava lamps reminded her of toys from her youth. She picked up some of Kappa Toys’ Italian Rody horse rockers for her mother and kids for Christmas, “so they can just race in the house,” she says.

“I really root for them to succeed, because you have all these big super stores that are now dominating the toy sector, and it’s pushed a lot of the small ones out,” Drobkin says. “I like the small ones. You’re able to navigate the store, and it’s fun.”

Newsome says a third Kappa Toys location is now in the works, and more exclusive toys are on the way for 2022. But it’s not simply expansion for the sake of expansion. There’s a clear-cut strategy involved: The more Kappa grows, the more people it can affect, and the better its toy experience can become.

For the holidays, the store surprised residents at the West Flamingo Senior Center with donated fine-art puzzles and games. And recently, Kappa supplied toys for Henderson philanthropists Robert and Sandy Ellis’ annual Christmas toy drive for Clark County children. As an independent toy store, Newsome says, Kappa Toys has a responsibility to its customers that retail giants don’t.

“Kids, even young adults, their psychological makeup is affected by the toys they play with, and the characters they interact with. That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in this industry,” she says.

“I have so many positive and negative formative memories from the toys that were given to me and the culture I was exposed to as a kid,” Newsome continues. “I want to have a responsible store where you can bring a kid of any age in and know that if they’re looking at something, there’s a little bit more thought behind it.”

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