About Us
Rotofugi Designer Toy Store & Gallery, established in July 2004, is located right on the edge of Chicago's Lincoln Park neigborhood in a beautiful vintage flatiron building. Since opening, Rotofugi has grown to become one of the world's premier sellers of designer toys from artists all over the world. Rotofugi features a diverse selection of vinyl figures, capsule toys, plush and more from both eastern and western designers. The adjoining Rotofugi Gallery features monthly art exhibits by a range of both local and nationally known artists.
Beginning in late 2007 Rotofugi partnered with Chicago based product development specialist Squibbles Ink to begin producing artist-designed figures by the talented designers located in their home town. Click here for more information on Squibbles Ink + Rotofugi projects.
Rotofugi is owned and operated by husband and wife duo Kirby and Whitney Kerr. You can find the couple in and around the store on most days. They love to talk about toys.
Rotowhat?
We get asked a lot about two things in particular: how do you say Rotofugi?...and...what the heck does that mean?
Well, when we say Rotofugi, we pronounce it with a "soft" G...like "RO-TOW-FOO-JEE." However, if you wanna give it a "hard" G sound we really don't care.
Strictly speaking, Rotofugi doesn't mean *anything*...it's a made up word. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to call our store "ROTO" something as a nod to the molding process used to make lots of vinyl toys: roto-casting. We also thought it would be appropriate to have a bit of a vaguely asian sounding name since a lot of the inspiration and artists that defined this genre came from Japan and Hong Kong in the early days (and still do). A good friend of ours suggested we take the name of our beloved beagle-shihtzu puppy (his name is "Fugi") and combine it with the "roto" that we wanted to use and a name was born!
Contact Us
You can reach us by phone at 773-868-3308 during our normal business hours and quite often even later than normal business hours.
If talking isn't your thing you can always send us an email to rotofugi@rotofugi.com. We do our very best to answer all emails in a timely manner (within 24 hours if not sooner) but sometimes we miss one, so if you don't hear back from us, just send another email bump and we'll get your questions all answered. Thanks!
Here's that info again without all the wordiness....
Phone Number: 773-868-3308
Email Address: rotofugi@rotofugi.com
