RVA Naturals: Where Toys Will Be Toys

by Charles McGuigan 12.2022

There’s a place you can do your holiday shopping for the kids on your list and actually bring a bit of the magic back into Christmas for them. What’s more you’ll be doing Mother Earth a big favor. No plastics here, no black mirrors made of rare earth metals the mining of which wreaks havoc on the environment, no synthetic fabrics, no computer screens. Plus this shop supports independently owned businesses that are all fair trade, thereby building local economies. Most importantly of all though, the toys sold here nurture the imagination, and kids actually play with them instead of staring vacantly at a screen.

Tricia Kambourian, owner and sole proprietor of RVA Naturals, greets me at the door to her shop in the Gayton Crossing Shopping Center. I follow her back to the counter, and she begins telling me a bit about the history of her toy store.

“This shop has only been open since July,” she says. “But I’ve been online for almost ten years. It started off real slow and it grew over time.”

The seed of it all was planted when Tricia and her spouse, Haig, decided to homeschool their children. “I like the freedom of it,” she tells me. “I liked that the kids could wake up when they needed to. They were able to have a kind of organic day. We would spend all day outside instead of in a classroom. We did a lot of forest schools.”

That was about the time Tricia learned about the Richmond Waldorf School. “Waldorf had all these wooden toys, and they were also just playing with sticks and dirt and acorn tops. And I thought, this is perfect. And that kind of turned me on to all the natural toys,” she says. “That just became a rabbit hole that I delved into. I said to myself, ‘Why can’t we find these toys everywhere?’”

She already knew about the big toy companies used by Waldorf families, places like Ostheimer’s and Grimm’s, but Tricia wanted to work with smaller companies. “I found them on Facebook and Etsy,” she says. “A lot of very small businesses that I’ve been able to contact and provide here as well to sell. A lot of them are very small businesses from Europe and the U.S.”

Each of those businesses has several things in common. “All of them use only natural materials, and those materials are sustainable,” says Tricia. “They are fair trade, and the products they make are all handmade.”

She takes me on a quick tour of the shop that begins not far from the checkout counter where there’s a display of long, rainbow-colored strands of silk. Tricia picks up a Dancing Wand by the handle and demonstrates by moving her hand rapidly in a figure motion which swirls and twirls the fabric in a sinuous motion that carves the air with streams of color. “I dye all the silks and I make all the silk toys,” Tricia says.

Adjacent to this display are shelves that contain blunt-edged swords and daggers crafted of wood, and a row of baby dolls that are heavily weighed. “The dolls are made by a woman in New Jersey,” says Tricia. “She makes all these babies for kindergarten and up. And as I said before, everything is made of natural materials, even the stuffing in the dolls is wool or cotton. There are no synthetic fibers used.”

Throughout the shop there are scores and scores of items to select from—bunny rabbits stuffed with Kapok (a natural alternative to cotton); a massive wooden castle that has a sculptural beauty to it; wondrous mobiles that feature a pig, an elephant, a flying cat, a horse, a dog and a hummingbird, all carved from hardwood; even dress up costumes, screen-printed and sewn by a woman in Georgia, where kids can use their imaginations and become a superhero, a dragon, a pirate, a butterfly, at least for a day.

There’s a lot more to it though. RVA Naturals also sells handmade baby clothes, children’s books, natural soaps and candles, and all natural craft supplies—everything from wool felt to modeling beeswax.

As she surveys her store, Tricia Kambourian says, “These toys will last forever; they might get knicks and dings, but they’re going to last.” And then she says, “It brings you back to a simpler life, a simpler childhood, and you don’t really need all the bells and whistles, and the gimmicks and the gadgets.”