Photos by Will Cornelius
Wife and husband-duo, Brittany and Mike Baron all smiles one week after opening their new children’s toy store, Marley and Moose, in Berthoud at 520 Mountain Ave.

By Will Cornelius
The Surveyor

Three-quarters of children’s toys end up in a landfill after six months and 90% of them are plastic. That is one of the reasons Brittany Baron and her husband Mike started Marley and Moose.

The other is Brittany Baron’s background. She has two decades of experience in public education as an early childhood development and education expert with degrees from Ohio State and New York University.

But three years ago, life was different. Living in New York City with her husband and three children, the COVID-19 pandemic threw her family’s life upside down. Losing her job at the beginning of Covid, she started to think about taking her career in a new direction.

“What am I going to do next? And you start throwing dreams out — right? I’m like, I want to open a children’s boutique of like the good stuff, the toys that are quality, that are going to last, they are educationally driven,” Baron said explaining her initial inspiration. Although the family had to deal with the pandemic first.

“When Covid started, we just fled,” Mike Baron said. Three kids, two adults and one tiny apartment in New York during the early days of the pandemic was something no one wanted to experience. The family spent a nomadic year traveling around the country while crashing with friends and family. “We had no plan and finally our oldest son said, “Can we just have a home?” All right, well, the next place we stop, we’ll stay there for a while and it ended up being Colorado,” Baron explained.
In 2021 with the pandemic receding and the Baron family taking to Colorado, Brittany started her children’s boutique.
She settled on the name Marley and Moose. It was “almost as hard as naming one of our kids!” she said. A gender-neutral name, Marley translates to “pleasant woods” and the moose pays homage to setting down roots in Colorado. The two also relate to the family’s love for camping and hiking.
Beginning as an online store, Baron eventually started doing small events and popups before collaborating with Nikola Bari at The Source Zero on Mountain Avenue in Berthoud.
“She and I connected, and she said, “Would you want to put kind of a corner of your store in here?” And we said, “Yeah, let’s try it out for six months.” So, we had a pop-up in there and the feedback was awesome,” Baron said.
From there the dream continued to grow. Mike Baron kept thinking the space at 520 Mountain Ave., would be perfect for the store. The only problem was he did not know who owned the store, so he introduced himself. “I just walked up on him while he was working. I don’t think I left him alone,” Mike Baron said while laughing. “Mike was going to make friends,” his wife added also laughing.
The persistence paid off and the Barons were able to secure the spot for Marley and Moose. With some renovations and child-proofing the retail space, it has been transformed into Berthoud’s newest children’s toy and boutique store. But it is the curated selection behind this toy store that makes it special. “That’s so important to us that everything we’re carrying is quality — it’s going to last,” Brittany Baron explained.
Offering toys that are high quality, built to last, and promote curiosity and early childhood development is central to Marley and Moose’s philosophy. “My kids are not gentle on toys, they play with all of their passion and joy,” she explains with a smile. The Baron children have personally tested almost all the toys in the store, something Baron said is important to make sure the toys are going to last.

If she finds a toy that does not quite fit one of her kids, she has a group of parents and their children she relies on for advice. “If I don’t have a kid in that demographic — I’ll have them take it home and give me some feedback on it,” she said.

In the beginning, finding the right toys was a daunting task. “We started just with like, making massive spreadsheets, all the brands that we know are quality and that we love. Then started reaching out to kind of our network of other parents and educators and kind of other shop owners and just building it from there,” she explained.

Using sustainable materials is also important for Baron. Many of the toys on display are made from wood, not plastic. She is not against plastic, but it is important to understand where the materials in toys come from. “It’s not entirely evil, but we want it to come from a good recycled sustainable source,” Baron said about plastic.
Coupled with sustainability is an ethos to support ethical brands. Arranged under a window with the morning light pouring in, a wooden ring stacker toy set starts with yellow on the bottom and darkens to blue with the smallest ring on top, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Sabo is a Ukrainian-based wooden toy manufacturer that donates 10% of its revenue to rebuilding Ukraine. Baron said despite unstable conditions they still create amazing toy sets, also offering a full set of wooden blocks with upper- and lower-case letters as well as symbols.

Now a mother of four, Baron hopes to expand the store in the future to have events and classes focused on children. With an enclosed patio deck too, she wants the space to be fun and inclusive for parents to bring their children.

After officially opening the store in early June, Marley and Moose are planning a grand opening for July 7.

Marley and Moose is open five days a week from Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is located at 520 Mountain Ave. in Berthoud.