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Mighty Ape welcomes customers of Leftbrain Group...

By Dylan

If you're reading this, you're probably a Leftbrain Group (iQ Toys, Baby Universe, Gumboot, Petspot, I Want That and Beauty 360) customer wondering why you've been redirected to Mighty Ape. Here's why…

The short story

  • Leftbrain Group went into liquidation and was purchased by Mighty Ape
  • We decided that we could deliver a better experience (faster delivery on a wider range of toys) for customers by folding iQ Toys, Baby Universe, Gumboot and the other Leftbrain sites into Mighty Ape vs. running the site independently

The long story

Back in April this year, Leftbrain Group Ltd went into voluntary liquidation. Customers were faced with the possibility of not receiving orders they had paid for – and suppliers and other creditors were required to seek payment from a liquidator.

Mighty Ape has long respected the iQ Toys website and saw an opportunity to strengthen parts of our business business, plus turn a bad situation around for affected Leftbrain customers. We acquired the Leftbrain websites from the liquidator – and went about a process to look after affected customers. There were about 800 customers with unshipped orders that had been paid for in full. We shipped every one of those orders – and gave a Mighty Ape credit in situations where we couldn't secure the appropriate stock.

After completing that process, it was our intention to get the iQ Toys and Baby Universe websites back up and running – and operate it for the foreseeable future as standalone websites, independent from Mighty Ape.

That didn't go quite to plan…

To cut a long story short, the Leftbrain website systems and warehouse systems were years and years behind Mighty Ape in terms of speed and efficiency. We put the iQ Toys, Baby Universe, Gumboot, I Want That and Petspot websites back up for 5 days – and in that time, we were frankly shocked at how difficult it was to manage promotions, prices and more importantly – ship orders. Ultimately, we simply couldn't run the sites and deliver the kind of customer experience we would be happy with. We've worked in e-commerce for long enough (over 15 years!) to know how things should work – and this wasn't it. So we packed up the stock from Leftbrain HQ in Tauranga, and shipped it up to Mighty Ape HQ in Auckland, NZ (definitely not as easy as it sounds!).

Since then, we've been working hard to make sure products previously available on iQ Toys, Baby Universe and the smaller Leftbrain sites are available on Mighty Ape, and will continue to be available on Mighty Ape. This involves creating product pages on Mighty Ape, stocking in products and working with key toy suppliers to ensure continued supply or popular product lines. The benefit of all of this is that we can now use Mighty Ape's superior systems to offer these products.

We are sad to see great websites like iQ Toys and Baby Universe close as we honestly hoped to run the site independently, but it just wasn't to be. On the plus side, by folding into Mighty Ape, Leftbrain can now enjoy the following benefits of being part of the Mighty Ape family:

  • Over 420,000 products in stock, including 70,000 toys
  • Fast delivery on in-stock toys
  • Fast & friendly customer support by 1800 phone or email

If you're a Leftbrain customer we really hope you'll give Mighty Ape a try. We look forward to being of service to you!

If you want to learn more about Mighty Ape please swing by our About Us page for photos of our office and warehouse, as well as a bit about our team. We're a 100% NZ-owned company and we're extremely passionate about online shopping!

If you have questions about this acquisition – please drop us an email :D

Tags: toys

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