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Strombecker Corporation is the leading maker of bubble blowing toys and cap guns in the world, controlling about half of each market, and also makes other basic toys like die-cast metal cars, wood blocks, and dish sets. The company's best-known brands are Tootsietoy, Mr. Bubbles, Hearts 'n Home, and Hard Body Die-Cast, and it also makes items using characters or designs licensed from Disney, Looney Tunes, Pfaltzgraff, General Motors, and Ford, among others. Strombecker is owned by the Shure family, which has run the company for four generations.

Origins

The roots of the present-day Strombecker date to 1876, when a trade paper called the National Laundry Journal was started on the West Side of Chicago. Its publishers, brothers Charles O. and Samuel Dowst, later began to make small laundry accessories like die-cast collar buttons and cuff-links. In 1893 Samuel Dowst saw a Mergenthaler Linotype machine at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, which made metal type for printing by injecting hot lead into molds. Realizing it could also effectively produce metal buttons, he convinced the company to purchase one.

I will take offers, in order to discount I need to sell in quantity to keep shipping low. The minimum offer will only be considered if it is for 3 or more.

Dowst soon began producing more metal items, including die-cast promotional trinkets for clients like the Flat Iron Laundry Company, which bought them to give away to its customers' children. These items, which included a flatiron, a top hat, a Scottie dog, and a candlestick, would much later be adopted for use as tokens in the board games Monopoly and Clue. In 1906 Dowst introduced the world's first die-cast toy car, and several years later began making one patterned after the Model T Ford, which went on to sell more than 50 million copies. The firm's toy vehicles were known as "Tootsietoys," after company founder Charles O. Dowst's granddaughter "Toots."…