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play pop

A toy shop on Spintex Road, selling online: hundreds of toys sorted by age, an AI helper that finds the right gift, and delivery or pickup from the shop.

Play Pop opened a toy shop on Spintex Road and needed to sell online quickly, before the prices from their till system were ready. So the shop had to launch as a real catalogue people could browse and ask about, then switch on prices and checkout without being rebuilt.

Client: Play Pop
What it is: Online shop
Where: Spintex Road, Accra
Address: playpopgh.com
Status: Launching soon

The Play Pop website, its opening screen

what it does

Online shop
Ask Pop, the AI helper
Shop by age
Delivery & pickup
Own admin

Pop and the whole Play Pop family in the clay tree: the little one with a teddy, the dress-up friend, Pop, the arts and crafts girl and the teenager

Hundreds of toys in departments and shelves, each one with photos and the maker's own age guidance.
Shop by age, from first rattle to teenager, so a parent who knows nothing about toys can still choose.
Ask Pop, an AI helper that reads the catalogue and suggests real toys for a child's age and interests, never a toy the shop does not have.
Cart, checkout and order tracking, with mobile money or card, delivery by their own rider or pickup at the shop.
A back office the shop runs itself: products, photos, shelves, orders, riders and the day's cash.
Their own design throughout, built around the tree from the real shop and a cast of characters for each age.

Children's names never reach the database. Ask Pop strips any name out of the question and the answer before either is stored, because a parent asking about a gift for their child should not leave a record of that child anywhere.

Pop, and the friends he came with

The shop had a logo and a real tree in the doorway. We turned the logo into a character: the two p's are his eyes and the little star between them is his nose, so his face reads as the name. He is not a baby, on purpose, because the older children have to like him too.

Then he got friends, one per age band, so a three year old and a thirteen year old each meet someone their own size. They stand on the shop-by-age discs, one of them peeks over the Ask Pop button, and Pop himself holds the home page under the tree.

The youngest of the Play Pop characters, in teal, holding a teddy

The dressing-up character in an olive outfit

The arts and crafts character, in pink, holding a paintbrush

The teenage character, in coral, with headphones and trading cards

Ask Pop, the part that answers back

Pop, the Play Pop character — One real answer from the live shop, replayed: the question, the wait, the toys it chose, and what it offers next.

Most people shopping for a child do not know what they want. They know an age, a budget and something the child likes. So the shop has a helper who takes that and comes back with real toys.

Ask Pop reads the shop's own catalogue for every question, so it can only offer toys Play Pop actually stocks. Before an answer reaches the screen the code checks each pick: a real page, and an age the maker agrees with. It never quotes a price or a stock count, because those change and a wrong one costs the shop a customer.

Asks its own follow-up when the question is too thin to answer well.
Answers in a couple of seconds, with the toys appearing as cards you can open.
Hands over to WhatsApp when someone would rather talk to a person.
Keeps no record of a child: names are stripped before anything is stored.

A catalogue that knows what it holds

Hundreds of toys went in with their photographs and the age the maker gives them, taken from the makers' own pages rather than guessed. That one decision is what makes the rest work: shop by age is real, the age on a card is real, and Ask Pop has something true to reason with.

The shop opened before the prices did. Every toy that has no price yet says so and offers WhatsApp instead, and the day the price list arrives it loads over the top without anyone rebuilding a page.

The shop, working

A cart, a checkout built for mobile money and card, and a choice at the end: their own rider brings it, or you collect it at the shop on Spintex Road. Every order gets a number you can track with your phone number, and a four-digit code you give the rider at the door.

Behind it the team gets a board: orders to confirm, to pack, ready, out with a rider, delivered. Riders see only their own stops, on their phones, and photograph the gate so the next delivery to that house finds it first time.

Run by the shop, not by us

Products, photos, videos, shelves, prices, pop-ups and the newsletter are all edited by Play Pop in their own admin, and the day's takings are counted per rider on one screen. We built it so the shop does not have to call us to change a toy.

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