What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue was built in the 1950s for a particular shopper: a winter visitor with an afternoon to spend and a house back east to decorate. Seventy years later the street still sells to that person, in jewelry, western wear, linen and art. What it did not have until 2010 was a door for the other visitor on the avenue, the one pushing a stroller past the jewelry cases while a toddler reaches for the turquoise. Zoolikins is that door, and from the outside it does not look like much: a modest storefront on the north side of the curve at No. 7118, a few doors west of Cartel Roasting Co., with a window of plush and the name over the door.
Inside it is denser than it looks. The front of the shop is the gift floor: plush from Jellycat, Mary Meyer and Aurora’s squat little Palm Pals, picture books face-out, a table of wooden and silicone toys that have been chosen rather than ordered by the pallet, racks of baby and toddler clothes and a wall of bibs, swaddles and the small feeding things that new parents discover they need at nine at night. Along one side is the Desert Finds shelf, the store’s Arizona edit, which is the reason a visitor rather than a resident should walk in. The back is the plush wall and the older-kid shelves, the games, craft kits and educational toys the shop added once the babies it had outfitted a decade earlier started asking for something to do. The cloth diapers the shop opened with in 2010 belong to its history, not its stock; they are no longer sold in-store.
The staff are the second thing you notice. The store was founded by mothers and is run by them, it trains its floor on every product it carries, and it has always treated advice as part of the stock. Ask what a six-month-old actually needs and you will get an answer rather than a gesture at an aisle. That advice is how a shop this size has held a customer base that drives in from across the Valley.
What to buy
Something from the Desert Finds shelf. A plush shaped like the state of Arizona, a Palm Pals saguaro named Prickles, a cowboy-boot or cowboy-hat plush, a set of desert-animal bibs, a pony crinkle teether, a sheet of cactus stickers or a picture book such as A Day in the Life of the Desert or There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea. These are the Arizona souvenirs sized for people under ten, and the only ones in Old Town that are not a scorpion in a lollipop.
An Arizona onesie or tee. The state-pride baby clothes are the store’s quiet bestseller with grandparents, and they are cut from decent cotton rather than the souvenir-rack kind.
A Jellycat. The shop is a stockist of the British plush that has become the gift of record for every baby shower in America, and it carries the oddities, the smiling sun bags and the vegetables, not just the bunnies.
A wooden toy or a craft kit for the older child. Since 2021 the store has deliberately added games, educational toys and craft kits so that the babies it outfitted a decade ago still have a reason to come in.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The address is on the north side of the Fifth Avenue curve, just west of Scottsdale Road, in the heart of the Fifth Avenue shops; the Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers the district. Street spaces on the avenue belong to regulars and vanish in high season. Use the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal, or the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and the flat seven-minute walk the Old Town on foot note describes. Both routes are stroller-friendly, which matters more here than at most shops on the street; the sidewalks along the curve are wide and shaded, and the door is level with the pavement.
Hours are ten to six, seven days, with the usual holiday closures (Easter, the Fourth, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day). Some directories still list a 9:30 opening, so call if you are planning an early start. Weekday mornings are the calm time and the staff are free for a proper conversation. Weekend afternoons from January through April bring the snowbird grandparents and the spring-training families, and a small shop with a stroller in it fills quickly. Summer is the reverse: the avenue is empty by noon, the store is air-conditioned, and a child who has been dragged through the jewelry shops can be released on the toy table.
The online store ships anywhere, free above a hundred dollars, and curbside pickup, a pandemic improvisation the regulars refused to give up, is still offered. If you are buying a shower gift for someone in another state, the shop will handle it.
Mini Social, next door
The storefront at 7116, sharing a wall to the east, is Mini Social, which the Zoolikins family opened in 2017 and which has its own guide. It began as the thing new parents in Scottsdale had been asking for and the city did not have: a play café, where a parent could get a coffee, sit through a class or a workshop and watch a toddler play, with drop-in hours on weekday mornings. The pandemic closed that version. It reopened in 2021 as an event venue, a 2,700-square-foot open room with a kitchen that now hosts baby showers, first birthdays, family dinners and the small weddings of 25 to 35 guests that became fashionable when the big ones were impossible; the room’s limit is about fifty. It is run by Luke and Jessica, and booking goes through its own site; the Mini Social guide has the rates, the floor plans, the food and alcohol rules and the full story of the play-café years. For a visitor the relevance is simple: if you are planning a shower or a toddler’s party in Old Town, the venue and the gift shop are one address.
Eat while you’re there
Cartel Roasting Co. is a few doors east at No. 7124 and is the coffee. Berdena’s on Craftsman Court does the better pastry and the quieter patio. For lunch with children, Diego Pops on Scottsdale Road is bright and tolerant, and Los Olivos on Second Street has been feeding downtown families since 1947. The Sugar Bowl, pink since 1958 at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue, is a five-minute walk and the correct bribe. The Scottsdale with kids note strings the whole family loop together, and Old Town Candy & Toys on Scottsdale Road is the other half of the district’s children’s shopping, retro candy where Zoolikins is plush and picture books. Kactus Jock and The Purple Saguaro, a few doors along Fifth, cover the Arizona T-shirt and the locally made ornament; Zoolikins is the stop for the gift that lasts.
How it got here
Fifth Avenue has always sold to visitors, and it has always been a street of small owner-run shops; that was the point of laying it out as a curve with courtyards in the early 1950s rather than a strip. What the avenue sold changed with the city. In the 1950s and 1960s it was Native jewelry and craft from the Kiva Craft Center and Sewell’s; by the 1980s it was gifts and galleries; by the 2000s the street was a pleasant boutique row with a dining scene about to take off in Craftsman Court, where FnB opened in 2009. None of it was for children. Scottsdale’s family shopping had moved to the malls decades earlier, and downtown’s one concession to the under-tens was the ice cream counter at the Sugar Bowl.
Two things changed that. The first was the cloth-diaper revival of the late 2000s, a national movement of young parents who wanted out of disposables and found that no store would help them. Across the country small specialist shops appeared to fill the gap, usually run by mothers, usually started at a kitchen table. Scottsdale’s version, by the account of one national baby-products guide, was a small business called Wildflower Diapers, working out of the Airpark in the late 2000s. The second was the condition of downtown in the 2010s: the Entertainment District east of Scottsdale Road was at full volume, the family layer of Old Town was thin, and the Fifth Avenue curve was about to be revived by exactly the kind of small, personal, owner-on-the-floor store it had been built for.
Zoolikins opened at 7118 East Fifth Avenue in 2010, and its founding statement, which it still uses, was precise about the gap it meant to fill: a supportive parenting community, and a selection of gifts for the tourists and parents who shared the street. The first stock was natural cloth diapers and earth-friendly baby goods, silicone and recycled plastic and wood in place of the usual. From there it widened the way a good baby shop must, because its customers’ babies grow: toys, books, clothing, feeding gear, then classes and workshops for new parents, then a play café next door when the parents asked for one. It trained its staff on every product, which sounds like a slogan until you ask a question on the floor.
The pandemic was the near-death moment and, in a way the founders could not have planned, the vindication. In the spring of 2020 Fifth Avenue emptied. Zoolikins stayed open because it sold diapers, which made it an essential business, and it spent the year building the online store it had never needed and a curbside system its regulars still refuse to let it retire. The play café closed. When the street came back in 2021, so did a wave of first-time parents and first-time grandparents who had spent a year at home, and the shop responded by refusing to be only a baby store: games, educational toys and craft kits for older children went in, and Mini Social reopened as an event venue for the showers and small weddings that the moment produced.
The most recent chapter connects the shop to the Valley’s own baby-products industry. Bumkins, the Phoenix company that Jakki Liberman founded in 1989 after failing to find baby gear she trusted, and whose waterproof bibs and silicone dishware now sell worldwide, has partnered with Zoolikins on a combined online store; the boutique’s story and shop pages now live on the manufacturer’s site, and a short-lived Zoolikins outlet at the Bumkins headquarters on East Washington Street in Phoenix is listed as closed. The Fifth Avenue store is unchanged by it: still owner-run, still staffed by mothers, still two doors from the coffee.
What Zoolikins represents on the avenue is the street’s founding idea applied to a customer the street never used to have. The Fifth Avenue guide describes a revival in the 2010s and 2020s of the small personal shop, and Carmen on 5th and Conscious Coterie, a few doors east at 7126, are its clearest examples for adults. Zoolikins is the same thing for families, and the one that proved a kids’ store could last fifteen years on a resort street built for jewelry. For a new resident the moving to Scottsdale note covers the larger questions; this is the answer to the smaller one of where in the city a person with a newborn is expected, and helped.