Brett and Susan Sommer had retirement in mind when they moved their family to Coeur dAlene from a New York City suburb three years ago. What they ended up with was anything but a leisurely retirement pace, after buying and restoring an old brick pharmacy building in the North Idaho citys downtown area and opening a retail store there called Figpickels Toy Emporium.


The store is busy all of the time so, needless to say, weve been a little shocked, Brett Sommer says.


Located at 312 Sherman Ave., Figpickels strives to provide an alternative to big-box stores by offering unique and nostalgic toys and executive gifts. The store opened Dec. 10, 2005, and has grown to seven full-time employees, not including the Sommers, who also put in long hours there.


The couple recently leased a 3,500-square-foot warehouse building at 902 Lincoln Way to help meet strong demand from customers who want items shipped to them, and launched an expanded Web site last week from which customers can order the toys that Figpickels carries.


The Sommers decline to divulge revenue figures for the store, but say sales were surprisingly strong last year and are up 40 percent so far this year. Also, they say theyve had numerous inquiries from people interested in opening Figpickels franchise outlets, but have been too busy running their store to explore fully whether they want to get into the franchise business.


They say they have taken preliminary steps, though, toward opening a Figpickels store in Boise, after being courted by an economic-development group there. Theyve scouted a potential store location in the Boise area, and, Right now we find that very attractive, Sommer says.


The opening of a second store will have to wait, though, he and his wife say, until they get their online store and expanded toy-shipping operation running smoothly.


Figpickels occupies the 2,400-square-foot main floor of the two-story building on Sherman. The Sommers live on the buildings second floor, and use the basement mostly as a stockroom. A large, colorful German carrousel visible through the stores front window serves both to lure passersby and foster a playful atmosphere inside. The stores nearly floor-to-ceiling toy displays of various types, packed into a relatively small space, seem designed to keep visitors captivated.


Some of the more unusual items offered for sale there range from a chunk of fossilized dinosaur dung, priced at $20, to a collection of 100 colorful insects mounted in lifelike fashion in a slab of acrylic resin, listed at $595.


The store has lots of less expensive items, such as wind-up sushi toys and whimsical whirligigs for $2.95, and also has some that are much pricier, such as hand-carved wooden rocking horses for $1,500 and $3,500. With probably an average price range of $25 to $30, by the Sommers estimate, Figpickels inventory includes games, puzzles, books, dolls, wooden toys, remote-controlled robots, musical instruments, and science and nature kits. For traditionalists, and reminiscing baby boomers, there are classic Tinker Toys and Lincoln Log building sets, Slinky Dogs, Rubiks Cubes, and Bozo 3-D Bop Bags.


The Sommers say their main desire was to create an inventory wide ranging enough to make anyone, regardless of age or spending tolerance level, feel comfortable to come in and shop. That strategy has worked well, they say. Susan Sommer adds, though, that to some extent, What we really ended up being was a refuge for grandparents. Grandparents have really come to trust us to help them pick out appropriate toys for their grandchildren.


She and her husband say they enjoy traveling, and go to international toy fairs in countries as far-flung as Germany and Turkey to select many of the toys they sell. Still, Susan Sommer says she prefers to buy American when possible and also prefers dealing with toy suppliers who give back to society in some way.


Although the vast majority of toys now are made in China, the Sommers say theyre particular enough about what toys theyre willing to carry that the recent recalls of Chinese toys due to possible lead-paint hazards has had no ill effect on their business. She says a review of Figpickels inventory uncovered just a couple of items affected by the recall, out of roughly 7,000 items the store carries. If anything, the recall controversy has had a positive effect on Figpickels sales because customers trust the store to carry toys that arent harmful, she says.


The Sommers try out all of the products that Figpickels sells, and during a reporters recent visit to the store, they and their employees were testing some of themsuch as a plastic gun that fired concentrated gusts of air long distanceson amused customers. The store has a number of hands-on displays that also encourage customers to try out the toys. Susan Sommer says one of her pet peeves is toy stores where youre not supposed to touch anything, so shes tried to do just the opposite at Figpickels.


The couples two sons, Devin, 20, and Austin, 17, are among the stores employees, and they say Devin is taking a year off from Evergreen State College, in Olympia, to learn the business.


Figpickels benefits from Coeur dAlenes heavy summer influx of tourists, and the Sommers say the mix of customers who came into the store when it first opened was probably 80 percent tourists and 20 percent local residents.


It seemed like for a longtime Coeur dAlene people didnt know we were here, Brett Sommer says. Though tourist trade still is a huge part of the stores business, the customer mix has changed to a more even balance in recent months as word-of-mouth about the store has spread, he says.


The Sommers discovered Coeur dAlene while touring the Northwest in search of possible new places to live. They had just restored a historic home in the New York City suburb of Mountain Lakes, N.J., but that community also was home to many professional people who died during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack at the World Trade Center, and they say that New York seemed like a different place after the attack.


Also, although they lived and worked for many years in the New York area, they both were rural people and wanted to find a more family-friendly place to finish raising their boys, Brett Sommer says.


It was just time to move on, he says.


Before moving here, they had operated a business in New York called Music Art Technologies Inc. that does electronic music design for Broadway productions. They still own that four-employee company, which Sommer says has been hard to phase out because we still have contracts.


The couple bought the old building in downtown Coeur dAlene, intending to live in the second-floor loft space and to lease out the main floor. They werent enthused, though, by any of the prospective tenants that expressed interest in the space because they were similar to many of the other businesses already operating in the area.


We started brainstorming. We knew nothing about retail. We knew nothing about toys per se, but she and Brett decided that was the kind of store they wanted to open there and then spent six months researching how to go about it, Susan Sommer says.


I found the name in one of my grandmothers cookbooks. It sounded like a horrible recipe, but a great name for a store, she says.


The store was supposed to open in the summer of 2005, but repeated construction-related delays disrupted those plans, and things got off to a hectic, disorganized start in the rush to open in time for Christmas, Brett Sommer says.


It was just terrible. Its surprising that everybody came back, but business has stayed strong ever since as the business has smoothed out those initial kinks, he says.


Its just been remarkable, Susan Sommer says. Though she complains about the struggles the business has experienced until now in responding to the large number of toy-shipping requests it receives, she acknowledges, Its a good problem to have.


As for retirement, she and her husband say they were too young to retire, anyway.


Contact Kim Crompton at (509) 344-1263 or via e-mail at kimc@spokanejournal.com.