Mainly Toys

Mainly Toys is a specialty toy shop based at 333 Remuera Road in the heart of Remuera Village, selling quality educational toys, books, puzzles, crafts and games, with a genuine family story behind the counter.

Services and what is on offer at Mainly Toys Remuera

Parents often mention finding toys in store that echo their own childhood favourites, updated and modernised but still recognisably the same kind of considered, well made toy that defined an earlier generation’s play. Remuera’s own concentration of schools, Remuera Primary, Remuera Intermediate, King’s School and the wider Grammar Zone secondaries, means a huge amount of local social activity, birthdays, class celebrations, end of term gifts, flows through the suburb, and Mainly Toys sits perfectly positioned within Remuera Village to catch exactly this kind of steady, genuine local demand. Families new to Remuera researching where to shop locally for their kids will find Mainly Toys consistently recommended within local parent networks and community groups, a genuine reflection of how deeply the shop has embedded itself into the suburb’s everyday family life over the years it’s operated from Remuera Village specifically.

Hours and how to book at Mainly Toys Remuera

Owner Kylie Watts grew up visiting Mainly Toys as a child at its original Mount Eden site, and years later took over the very same shop she once wandered through as a kid, now running it herself alongside her own two young children and her mother Raewyn, who also works in store. Mainly Toys maintains an active Facebook presence with over 1,300 followers, regularly sharing new stock arrivals and seasonal gift guides, worth following directly for Remuera families who enjoy browsing new arrivals online before a visit, or who want early notice of school holiday programmes and events the shop sometimes runs in store. For families new to Remuera and still building a sense of the suburb’s local businesses, Mainly Toys’ genuine longevity and multi-generational ownership story offers an easy, low risk entry point into supporting an established local retailer, rather than needing to research an unfamiliar new business from scratch. As Remuera continues to grow and change around it, new housing developments, evolving family demographics, Mainly Toys’ consistent presence in the village offers a genuine point of continuity, the kind of long standing local business that helps a suburb retain its own distinct character even as everything around it shifts.

What visitors mention

The shop’s product range includes well regarded brands like Alex, Djeco, Le Toy Van, Lamaze, Mobilo, Meccano, Playmobil and Orchard Games, giving Remuera families genuine variety across ages and interests, from open ended imaginative play through to more structured educational games and puzzles. For families comparing Mainly Toys against bigger toy retailers elsewhere in Auckland, the genuine point of difference is curation, a smaller, carefully chosen range from an owner with a personal, decades long connection to the shop, rather than the overwhelming scale of a big box toy chain. The shop’s careful curation extends to how staff engage with customers too, families report staff taking genuine time to understand what a specific child might enjoy rather than simply pointing toward whatever’s currently popular, a level of personalised service increasingly rare in larger toy retail environments.

Planning the visit

Being family run matters to how Mainly Toys operates day to day. The connection between mother and daughter running the shop together adds a genuine warmth to the customer experience that’s hard to manufacture in a larger, more corporate retail environment, and it’s part of why families who’ve shopped there for years often speak of Mainly Toys as feeling like a proper local institution rather than just another shop in the village. Given how much toy shopping happens under time pressure ahead of a specific event, Mainly Toys’ central Remuera Village position, an easy walk or short drive for most local families, removes a genuine practical barrier compared to needing to travel further afield for quality toy shopping.

More listings are on the Remuera suburb hub and in Family Shopping & Retail. The official page is Mainly Toys.