Designer toy shop Magic Pony closes after a decade on Queen West

Designer toy shop Magic Pony closes after a decade on Queen West

(Image: Magic Pony)

Magic Pony, the vibrant Queen West concept shop and Canada’s first purveyor of designer playthings, closed on Sunday. In a touching farewell post on the shop’s blog, co-creators Kristin Weckworth and Steve Cober cited the development of Queen Street (and no doubt higher rents) as the reason for leaving the prime location. “There’s been a harshness to the last few years in small business that has taken its toll and threatened our existence. We’ve found that there are compromises we don’t want to make in order to remain on Queen Street and we’d rather take this somewhere new, where the sky is open with possibility.”

Over its 10 years in business, Magic Pony served as a hub for local artists and designers. It also collaborated on events and exhibits with the Art Gallery of Ontario, OCAD and Luminato, and boasted celeb customers like Julia Roberts, who was spotted there last fall during TIFF. According to Weckworth and Cober, the company will now become “part pop-up shop, part website and part hologram.” Until May 19th, designer toy enthusiasts can browse the store’s quirky artist creations at the Design Exchange, where it’s popping up alongside the exhibit This Is Not A Toy.