The Dragonfly Toy Company turned a part time job into a million dollar a year enterprise while helping thousands of special needs children learn through play.

Over a decade ago Renata Bursten was looking to buy some Christmas toys for the special needs kids in her developmental therapy group. When she couldn't find any her husband Lee Doerksen offered to make some for her.

Canadians spend about $1.5 billion per year
on toys.

Through research they found a number of small specialty toy manufacturers and realized that there was no centralized supplier in the industry. Hence, The Dragonfly Toy Company was born.

Today the company has thousands of clients worldwide including every state in the US and every province in Canada!

Before The Dragonfly Toy Company, this industry was decentralized with a supply chain that developed around segregated hospitals. The Dragonfly Toy Company cut into that market and moved on to reach over twenty countries.

The product manufacturers are approximately 70% international and 30% Canadian. The Dragonfly Toy Company's new, state-of-the-art warehouse in North Dakota uses a just-in-time delivery system which links inventory levels in the warehouse to orders, allowing them to operate without large stocks of each product on hand. It's all part of staying efficient, keeping costs down and passing the savings on to consumers.

In 2001 there were 3.6 million Canadians with disabilities, which represents 12.4% of the population.

The Dragonfly Toy Company prints one off copies of their catalogues for customers, having developed a unique software program that prints only the catalogue sections relevant to a customer needs, saving everyone time and money. They've licensed this software to a US software firm for sale as a stand alone product. How's that for turning a cost item into a potential profit centre?

Lee's self-taught programming skills keep their 16 computers humming with a variety of custom programs. The phone lines are humming too, with thank you calls from pleased parents and an ever increasing number of new orders.