About OOZ & OZ

OOZ & OZ creates Morph-O-Scopes – educational toys that nurture play and development in children. We create elementary school learning toys and interactive games that children take into their hearts and minds!  Toys that engage children across the spectrum – gifted, exceptional, autistic.  We create unique children’s party entertainment, children’s arts and crafts, and unique science toys that surprise and delight and teach and challenge children, just enough.

This has been our mission since 1989, when founder Myrna Hoffman invented an unusual coloring and drawing activity for her daughter’s seventh birthday party. The idea was based on an ancient Chinese optical illusion amusement device – the “anamorphoscope” – that had fascinated her for decades. It uses curved mirrors to magically re-form specially morphed drawings into normal reflections – like a reverse fun house where the person is warped, but his reflection appears right.

Party guests, too, were so enchanted by the brain-tickling fun that parents urged Ms. Hoffman to create more mirror art educational toys and games.

The following summer Hoffman produced her ingenious Mirror-aculous Art Activities Kit, immediately winning a Parents’ Choice Gold Doing & Learning Award. The Kit now has earned nineteen top national toy honors.

In addition, Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Media TV named Ms. Hoffman a 2001 national winner of its “Build Your Own Business” Contest.  And in May 2004, Ms. Hoffman earned the SBA’s Entrepreneurial Success Award for Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan District.

A born artist, inventor, and entrepreneur, Myrna Hoffman was organizing neighborhood carnivals for charity and earning the first of her many creative awards before the age of 11. She now resides near her daughter in Seattle, Washington, where she is growing her line of brilliant family fun products.

OOZ & OZ is now a proud Washington State Certified Women’s Business Enterprise.

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