Growing Through Arts® Retailer Profile: Dancer's Dream

As a mother of two girls, and now the grandmother of a 3 ½ year old, Penny Anderson knows a good children’s toy when she sees one.

Owner of Dancer’s Dream, a dancewear retail store in Geneva, IL, Anderson is a big fan of the Growing Through Arts® Stage Scene Play Sets, which include removable characters that children can attach to an illustrated backdrop to act out the scenes from the Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella ballets.

“My granddaughter, Grace, loves them,” she says of the Stage Scene Play Sets. “She constantly gets them out.”

Anderson says moms will love them, too, because the pieces can stick to anything from books to tables to car windows without leaving a film, and you can simply wipe them off with hot water to keep them clean.

Dancer’s Dream carries a wide range of dance products, including shoes, clothes and accessories for ballet, tap, jazz, gymnastics, yoga and ballroom dance. But since the store is located in a historic downtown filled with lots of stores and boutiques, customers often come into the store looking for gifts as well.

“I have a lot of people who come in who are looking for a birthday present, or if there’s a production going on, they want a special gift for their child who has done so much hard work,” she says.

That’s one of the reasons that Anderson has dedicated an entire wall to showcasing the complete line of Growing Through Arts® books and toys.

In addition to the Stage Scene Play Sets, Anderson carries the matching Ballet Series storybooks, Practice & Play workbooks and Alphabet Set, as well as the Music Series collection of storybooks about classical music, opera and musical theater.

Anderson says parents like the books because of the vocabulary words that are included in the glossary that teach children about theater and dance terms, such as en pointe, pas de deux, or intermission.

“It helps them so they’re a little bit knowledgeable, but they’re having fun at the same time,” she says.

Anderson is proud to be both a Growing Through Arts® and a Russian Pointe® retailer. In fact, Anderson has been buying Russian Pointe® shoes ever since her oldest daughter, who is now 24, started dancing in pointe shoes as a teenager.

At first, her daughter was not fit properly in other stores and would often break her shoes. So one day, Anderson and her daughter drove to downtown Chicago to visit the Russian Pointe Dance Boutique, and Aleksandra Efimova fitted her daughter personally.

“Aleksandra knows exactly how to fit a shoe to a dancer’s foot,” Anderson says.

When Anderson decided to open her own dancewear retail store in May 2012, she knew she would only carry Russian Pointe® shoes.

“With Russian Pointe, the quality is amazing,” Anderson says. “I think Russian Pointe is the best shoe out there.”