User:Toyguru

== Marianne Szymanski == Marianne Szymanski is founder and president of Toy Tips, Inc., an independent group that conducts on-going academic research on toys and products for children. Toy Tips is a trusted source for parents, grandparents and educators as a source of information on toys for children.

A national author (TOY TIPS: A Parent's Essential Guide to Smart Toy Choices/Jossey Bass), entrepreneur, media personality, speaker, university adjunct professor and social media blogger, Ms. Szymanski has led her organization's unbiased tests of over 125,000 products from more than 7500 manufacturers for over two decades.

A former retail sales representative for an international toy manufacturer, Marianne saw the opportunity to provide parents with unbiased honest information on how to select products that enhance their own child's development. Her sole mission is to encourage parents to be their child's own toy expert. This inspired the 1991 formation of The Toy Tips Research Institute, a year-round program of individual toy evaluation and testing that does not accept revenue from manufacturers for testing. Independent from the toy industry, Toy Tips publishes report cards on toys that surpass Toy Tips testing standards known as "TTT" (Toy Tips tested and trusted). This mark is the first of its' kind to study and evaluate child development skills applied to toy use.

In 1996, Ms. Szymanski launched Toy Tips Magazine to provide parents with unbiased information about toy reviews, toy safety, durability, learning value, age appropriateness and enjoyment. To date, twenty four million copies have been distributed through retailers, hospitals, pediatricians and educators. Renamed, Toy Tips & Parenting Hints, the publication has grown to include research on parenting, child safety, health and studies on child development and childhood chronic diseases. This was sold on newsstands throughout the United States and Canada in 2007- 2009 at Target, Barnes and Noble, national grocery chains and independent booksellers and through school magazine fundraisers. An online version of Toy Tips & Parenting Hints is available free on the company website at toytips.com.

In order to serve her local community with toy lending, Ms. Szymanski created the Toy Tips Toy Lending Library in conjunction with the Franklin Public Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This program reached a 10 year anniversary milestone in 2012. She also was hired to create toy lending programs for both Hilton and Hyatt hotels. Currently, an online collection of her work is available at The Strong Museum in Rochester, NY.

Toy Tips has been published in research journals in the United States and the United Kingdom. Marianne often lectures about entrepreneurship and bootstrapping a business from the ground up. She served as an adjunct professor in the undergraduate program at the Lloyd Grief Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Southern California and the graduate entrepreneur program at Marquette University, her alma mater. Currently, she is back teaching at the University of Southern California and is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Lloyd Grief Center of Entrepreneurial Studies in the Marshall School of Business.

Ms. Szymanski is the 1996 recipient of the Wisconsin Small Business Association Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and a delegate of the 1995 White House Conference on Small Business in Washington, D.C.

Producing and hosting her own Toy Tips segments for a variety of news stations across the U.S, Ms. Szymanski appears regularly on television. From 1992-1998, she was the resident toy guest on ABC's Good Morning America, and logged 53 segments with additional guest appearances. She has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, Dr. Oz, Rachael Ray, The Today Show, The Discovery Channel, FOX and Friends, Lifetime, HGTV, Oxygen, Network, A View from the Bay,The History Channel, the Jane Pauley Show, PAX, The Early Show and close to 300 local new stations across the country. You can see her often as a guest on KTLA in Los Angeles and the FOX station in Chicago.

Ms. Szymanski firmly believes that volunteer work is just as important as having a job. She served on the marketing committee of the Betty Brinn Children's Museum in Milwaukee for over 10 years, is the former chair  for St. Francis Hospital Foundation, was a Cub Scout leader for 5 years and is a past auxillary board member of the Boys and Girls Clubs.

She holds a dual degree in psychology and marketing from Marquette University and graduated from the Stanford Publishing Course at Stanford University.

For more information, see toytips.com.