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Our Stories

Fairground Child

• Fair trade
• Organic
• Sustainable
• Multicultural

...a totally different children's store!

Fairground Child has been providing children with fair trade and eco-friendly toys and clothes since 2004. We began selling cloth nappies and sustainable timber toys at St Andrews Market, a short stumble down the hill from our solar powered home, shortly after our first child was born. Why? Well, essentially because we couldn't find anywhere to buy them ourselves but knew they were available both within Australia and overseas. The business evolved as our baby grew and we went beyond our essential needs of nappies and wooden baby gyms, to creative playthings that simultaneously encouraged multicultural understanding, a respect for the environment by choosing products made from renewable resources and biodegradable materials and were also ethically made (not by other people's children in enormous sweatshops) or, even better, fair trade produced (ie organisations set up with the aim of community wide poverty alleviation). With Robyn's background in design development work in India, she'd finally stumbled across a way of fulfilling a long term desire to create markets for products that not only generate income for communities, but also represent a global craft heritage that is both rich and endangered.

We finally embarked on opening our Nicholson Street store in June 2007 and our second store, in Station Street, Fairfield, opened in September 2009. Both stores showcase children's products that are fair trade, organic, sustainable, multicultural and hand made- from as near as East Brunswick and as far as Ecuador! The website could never represent the full diversity of products available in our stores but over time we hope it will reflect some aspects of these two treasure troves and offer the same quality customer service that a family based business can offer. There are pages more that could be written here, but it all really comes down to the birth of one young man and the awareness he brought of every other child in the world, each of whom deserve to play with or wear natural products, each of whom deserve to live in dignity and not in slave-labour, and all of whom deserve to inherit a world that is both sustainable and abundant in beautiful, handmade heirlooms.

Visit our two Melbourne stores-Fairfield and North Carlton!