10 Great Holiday Gifts Under $50
Dec.14
Photo credit: Ian Barnard
Christmas Day is only two weeks away, but your shopping list isn’t getting any shorter. Between your kids, relatives, friends, and the lucky colleague whose name you picked from the Secret Santa bowl, there are probably still a few handfuls of folks you’d like to surprise with a little something special this year. ‘Tis the season to feel elfish, right?
Giving gets even better when it’s done without breaking your holiday budget. We’ve compiled a quick list of 10 great holiday gifts under $50, which we’ll gladly ship to any of the 48 contiguous states for free until the last day of December. When you give a gift from WallCandy® Arts, you support a small mom-owned-and-operated business that designs products proudly made in the USA with non-toxic, high quality materials that will last for years to come. So, go ahead – shrink your shopping list with universally appealing wall décor from our 10-under-$50 gift guide:
Luv Letters – $6 per letter
Help your coworker claim his cubicle with starry blue stick on letters, provide your family’s patriarch with a proud surname to display on the foyer wall, or personalize your daughter’s bedroom with peel and stick letters in a whimsical bird print.
Superstar Chalkboard – $14
Give your niece a removable, reusable chalkboard star sticker to decorate her bedroom door now (and her dorm room door later). It’s removable and reusable without damaging surfaces, so her parents and future resident advisor won’t have to worry about chips or smudges.
Mini Chalkboard Panels – $18
Redesign your beau’s office space or your son’s pretend workshop to include mini chalkboard decals he can use and reuse to manage his to-do list without damaging that cherished Mets-themed paint job.
Mini Whiteboard Panels – $18
If there’s only one way to show your child’s teacher some thoughtful holiday appreciation, it’s giving him or her a trio of peel and stick dry erase decals for the classroom, kitchen, or home office.
Watch Me Grow – $32
For your family’s littlest growers, a cheerful growth chart wall sticker provides the best way to check vertical progress daily without marking up the walls.
Design Your Own Snowman – $38
For your aunt and uncle’s family, a design-your-own-snowman kit packed with removable, repositionable winter wall decals will encourage them to spend more than a few snowless afternoons sipping hot cocoa and building snow pals indoors.
Rococo Chalkboard – $36
This regal-looking decorative chalkboard decal is gorgeous enough to fit in with your best friend’s posh living room décor and functional enough to provide your dear mother a place for working out her latest recipes.
Chalkboard Heart – $36
No kitchen is complete without a peel and stick chalkboard heart for jotting down phone messages, grocery lists, or love notes. This spacious chalkboard wall decal is the perfect place to write “I adore you” all year long.
Night Lights – $48
Surprise your dear mother with a screened-in porch decked out in glow in the dark wall decals that emit just the right amount of moonlight without electricity or recharging. Each peel and stick strand is removable and reusable, so she can easily transfer her design to the guest bedroom in case visiting grandkids need a little nighttime light.
My Sunshine – $48
Know a nursery or playroom in need of some warmth? This all-in-one sunshine kit comes with a brilliant sun wall decal and the celestial accessories to keep blossoming babies always looking on the bright side.
Need your gifts by Christmas Day? Order with ground shipping by Dec. 16, or with expedited shipping by Dec. 20. We can’t guarantee that orders placed after those dates will arrive in time.
Happy holidays!
Allison Krongard Tells Fox Business Center Why WallCandy® Arts is Made in the USA
Nov.8
For Allison Krongard, WallCandy®’s founder and president, owning a company that proudly manufactures its product in America is well worth the extra labor costs.
During a Fox Business Center segment on the value of the “Made in the USA” label, Allison explained to anchor David Asman that she never once considered paying less to produce WallCandy in China, simply because quality is a top priority.
Choosing to manufacture the product domestically meant that she could always visit and revisit each design’s creation at any given point in the production process, including getting someone on the phone to discuss a detail in real time.
“As a parent, I put this product in my children’s rooms,” she told Asman. “I think of other parents and I want to know that what I’m doing is safe, always.”
An infographic displayed during the interview showed that, of the product recalls since November 1999, 1800 were products made or partially made in China, while only 600 were products made or partially made in America.
Sure, manufacturing any product in U.S. costs a little more – approximately $10 to $12 an hour compared to China’s $1 or $2 an hour, according to Asman – but the extra cost ensures that WallCandy’s wall decals and removable wallpaper will be created with high quality, non-toxic vinyl and manufactured without BPA, phthalates, and VOCs.
Despite China’s cheaper labor costs, sacrificing safety and American jobs for a lower price tag wasn’t that tempting, Allison explained.
“Maintaining the quality was the most important thing to me,” she said, “and keeping jobs in America.”
“I think what speaks to the quality is that, in 11 years of having this company, I’ve had less than a 1% failure rate on the product, and I think that’s American manufacturing.”
In March, World News with Diane Sawyer aired “Made in America,” a three-part report in which an American family allows ABC to replace every imported item in their home with American-made versions. At the end of the first segment, journalist David Muir reported economists’ findings that, if every American spent 18 cents more on American goods each day, which amounts to only $67 each year, the impact would create 200,000 American jobs.
If you didn’t catch Allison’s two-minute interview on Fox Business Center, click on the image at the top of the page to watch.
The Universal Language of Fun: Wall Stickers & Wall Decals
Apr.21
It should come as no surprise that our removable wall decals and wall stickers are popular in many countries around the world. After all, most of our themes of wildlife, flowers, forest scenes, dinosaurs, automobiles and childhood fantasies are universally cherished.
We do a brisk business across the European continent and if you notice the wide variety of magazine genres above, our overseas press coverage reflects a diverse customer base and appeal across all ages. In this newsstand sampling, we have mags covering nature, parenting, celebrity gossip and women’s lifestyle/fashion.
WallCandy Arts is a natural magnet to parenting and childcare magazines, but it’s always a pleasant surprise to see where our instincts for interior decorating take us. For example, take a glance at the shopping spread below where our retired “SophistiKit” sticker collection shares the spotlight with new bikini fashions, kitchen appliances, designer furniture, luxury skin care products and chicken or veal recipes (I can’t tell what kind of meat that is, but it looks absolutely dee-lish!).
For some reason, the SophistiKit design never really caught on. Now, I’ve never been a teenage girl — or even come close to understanding their mindset, but I think these young sleek women walking their Paris Hilton-sized dogs look quite hip and fashionable. If you’d like them to make a comeback, please start a petition drive. We’d love to hear from you about this style or any other wall sticker design.
The thing that makes me the happiest about this magazine clip is seeing the words “Made in the USA” beam out of a paragraph in a foreign language. All too often, it is the other way around, and it is personally important to me to support a company which supports American workers.
As with the teenage girls, I do not profess to have any special insights into the psychology of Jessica Simpson. But from her facial expression above, it seems to me that she would much prefer to be holding some WallCandy stickers than yet another designer handbag.
We are flattered by the company in the above magazine layout, though. But the reality is that you don’t have to be wearing gold jewelry or talk on a Giorgio Armani smartphone to afford our reasonably priced collections of adorable glow-in-the-dark owls or whimsical chalkboard animal wall stickers.
And our pediatrician and opthalmologist approved “Smarts Bees & Trees” nursery decoration set improves vision and gives babies a head start regardless of which language they may be cooing gurgling in.
Are you loving this cross-cultural wall decal experience? Please visit the media coverage section of our European distributor, Da Da Kids, for an afternoon’s worth of fun reading material!
