SME Universe | Plush heavyweight enters Costco

It is a decisive breakthrough carried out smoothly.

Marc Tison
The Press

Manimo heavy stuffed animals are making a place for themselves on the shelves of Costco and Walmart’s Accès pharma pharmacies.

Designed by the Longueuil-based company fdmt for children aged 3 to 12, these comforting one to two kilogram soft toys lighten the mind by weighing on the body. They provide a feeling of calm in anxiety-provoking situations and can promote attention and concentration.

They were mainly distributed in schools and specialized clinics, but the pandemic has both increased the pressure on children and made the general public aware of the issues of juvenile stress.

“Recently, we’ve really seen an opening,” says Michelle Vallée, director of sales and marketing at fdmt. “With the pandemic and the level of stress, we talk more about the difficulties in concentrating. »

“So when we knocked on the doors of major retailers, there was an immediate awareness of a need to help children manage their stress. »

The first contacts with Costco had been established at the end of 2021. Manimo soft toys will appear in 10 stores next October. Thanks to the agreement signed earlier this year with Accès pharma, stuffed animals are showing their full weight in some thirty new points of sale. The offensive carried out over the past year by fdmt has made the Manimo menagerie appear in most pharmacy chains in Quebec.

“We really listened quickly, rejoices Michelle Vallée. It has to be done, for a small company like us, which arrives with a plush at a fairly high price. But it’s all the added value for its therapeutic side that is really interesting. »

The idea came to the president and founder of fdmt, Karine Gagner, in the early 2000s.

“What was a big motivation was her own child who was diagnosed with autism,” says Ms.^me Valley. “It was a product that did not exist on the market. She worked with occupational therapists to develop a soft toy that would be therapeutic. Because the deep pressure that can be exerted on a good surface of the body will really help children who have special needs. »

Manimo stuffed animals are weighted with small recyclable plastic balls whose mass conforms to the body through the stuffed envelope of the small animals.

With around thirty employees, fdmt specializes in the distribution of “sensory products”. Manimo soft toys, retailed in four animal versions, are the only products designed by the company.

For fifteen years, they were manufactured in Quebec, but the increase in demand had prompted the small company to outsource production to Asia.

The contracts signed this year, however, open a new era for the company.

“It completely changes the game,” says Michelle Vallée. With Costco, we talk about pallets. It’s very different, and it also brings us a change of business model. »

So much so that the company wonders if it might not be time to repatriate the manufacture of Manimo.

“It’s a project that we are studying, because the transport is made expensive, and we also have to be sure of the raw material”, informs the director.

“We think we could have better control here with a completely automated line, which also means very significant investments. »

A project that weighs heavily financially, but which could be comforting.

Qualinet overwhelmed by the deluge

Qualinet’s telephone system was overwhelmed following the torrential rains that hit Montreal on September 13th. The torrential rain that showered some areas of the metropolitan area with 40 mm of water in one hour caused sewer backups and damage to thousands of homes, businesses, industries and institutions, in turn causing a deluge of calls to the telephone service of the company specializing in disaster recovery. Nearly a thousand customers contacted Qualinet in less than three hours in the Montreal and Lanaudière regions. The volume of calls received in 90 minutes by some call centers was such that it caused a system overload. “We have noticed that severe thunderstorms are more and more frequent in Quebec and that our 24/7 telephone service is sometimes faced with capacity challenges in terms of the number of simultaneous calls”, indicated the president of the company, Éric Pichette, in a press release. “In this context, I confirm that we will quickly deploy a system similar to that of 911 services to always respond to our customers. It will be an investment of nearly $200,000. »

A first store for KaseMe

The Quebec manufacturer of protective cases for cell phones KaseMe ventures out of its shell and will open its first store in Quebec. KaseMe had opened the door two years ago with a pop-up store in the same location during the holidays. The store will be inaugurated on September 21 in the Laurier Quebec shopping center. Founded in 2015, KaseMe creates and prints in Beauce plastic shells for cell phones with exploded graphics. It has since expanded its line to headphone cases, laptop covers and chargers. In addition to its website, the company already distributed its products in 250 points of sale of various chains in the country. She saw her turnover climb to 7.5 million in seven years. With the addition of this first store, KaseMe increases the number of its employees to 30. She plans to expand the concept across Quebec. If consumers answer the call, of course.

The Quebec polymer sector is building a binder

Alliance Polymères Québec, a group of businesses in the plastics and composite materials sector, launched a collaborative portal for its industry on September 13 — a sort of link for the 500 businesses in the sector, mostly SMEs. “We’ve been working on this for more than a year and a half,” says Simon Chrétien, executive director of the Alliance. “It’s not just a portal, an extranet or an intranet. It’s an industry social network. It offers plastic parts manufacturers, their customers, suppliers and distributors “a central location, a common home, where they can find everything they need in terms of information.” The portal presents a directory of companies in the sector, document templates, a discussion forum, exchange circles. It also offers a terminological dictionary of 500 French terms from the plastics industry and their English equivalents, developed with the financial support of the Office québécois de la langue française, “so that everyone speaks the same language”, says Simon Christian. The portal, which is free to access, is also aimed at all companies interested in the sector, he says. “They can find information, suppliers, partners there. Definition of binder, according to the dictionary of the portal: “Adhesive material used to bind a batch of components (dry particles, plastics, fibers, etc.) together. »

78

Fork blue sits with La Table Ronde. The St. Lawrence marine resources sustainable management program at the Exploramer science museum in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts has established a partnership with the La Table Ronde collective to certify 78 of its restaurants. This certification establishes links between fishermen and gourmet restaurateurs and supports the marketing of Quebec marine products.