How Go! Retail Group’s Alex Winkelman is infusing her passion for impact into the family business.
By Alex Winkelman
Growing up, I always wanted to be in retail – fashion specifically. I was accepted, early decision, to FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising), but living with a local family in Costa Rica the summer after my junior year in high school changed my life.
I found myself wanting to be in the impact space and I made that dream come true, pivoting to study education and then social entrepreneurship. I immediately put my degree to work while running a nonprofit that I started in college, and then on a start-up in the maternal health space focused on community, resources and support for women and mothers.
Then in 2020, I found myself newly divorced without a paying job, a caregiver to my mom who was dying of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, and in a pandemic with a five-year-old at home with me.
Talk about needing a support system! I was in need of the very thing I was putting in countless unpaid hours into at my start-up to help other women. This time, I needed to help myself. I could no longer do the entrepreneurial life in the way I had been nor did I want to do the “go big or go home” approach. I needed and wanted a salary, a team, health insurance, benefits and a 401k – most of which I had never had through a job.
It’s been three years since I joined Go! Retail Group, the company that my dad, Marc Winkelman, 4th generation retailer, has been building and running since we moved to Austin in 1993. A big (and favorite!) part of my job is building brands that are centered around kids — Toys“R”Us, Wonder World, and Snoozimals are a few of our brands that I work on.
As a mom to a now 10 year old, I am incredibly passionate about kids being healthy and happy and growing into healthy, happy, and responsible adults. This feels extra important and pressing today as we see a rise in mental health issues among young people. Jonathan Heidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, shares that our kids are in crisis, as we are seeing startling rises in high psychological distress, anxiety, depression, emergency room visits, self-harm, school alienation and suicide attempts in adolescents and teens. Heidt cites study after study that shows that between 2010 and 2015, with the introduction of smartphones, social media, forward facing cameras and online video games, is when things changed drastically for our kids and their mental health; calling it a “tidal wave” of adolescent mental illness.
There are five important features of childhood: slow-growth, free play, connection with parents and caregivers, social learning and getting the right experiences at the right time. These aspects of childhood are essential to becoming healthy and happy adults, but we are seeing a decline in all of this due to a number of factors, including “phone based childhoods;” whether parents and/or caregivers are on the phone or the children themselves are on the phone or tablet.
The solution is not easy, but a few things are clear. We need to play more. All of us – not just the kids. And we need more in-person connection. When we open new stores in a day and age that most have disappeared and online shopping reigns, and when people come in to find a new toy to play with, a new game for game night, or art supplies to be creative with, I am inspired and hopeful. While some might think we simply sell toys and games, what we really sell is growth, playfulness, creativity, imagination, connection, curiosity, and joy.
There is no shortage of smiles and laughter in our stores and when playing with our products. Come into one of our Austin-area locations and see for yourself: Wonder World at Barton Creek Mall, Attic Salt at Barton Creek Mall, and Toys“R”Us at Tanger San Marcos.
Just in time for the holidays – some favorites toys and games that bring calm, joy and connection to me and my son: Monopoly, Uno, Lego, Koosh Double Paddle Set, Othello, Chess, Rubik’s Race, Guess Who? and Mancala.