Action Figure : Charlie Woo Made a Big Impact on Business in ‘Toytown,’ a Thriving Collection of Wholesale Toy Companies. With the City’s Help, He Says, More Could Be Done to Revitalize Downtown.

I feel a really strong sense of responsibility to the small-businessmen in my area. I really believe the small, entrepreneurial spirit is what we will need in the future. Big business is downsizing.

This side of Downtown, the eastern section, is not as glamorous as the west side, but it’s just as important. This is an area generating the blue-collar jobs that are not that easy to come by these days. This is the center for a lot of industries--toys, flowers, seafood, garments, produce.

I hope this area can receive some attention from the city in the next few years. Slowly, Downtown is being revolutionized, but we have a lot of minds to change. The city has really concentrated on the white-collar industries and on the high-rises and the glamour companies.

We’ve done a lot here by ourselves, but with the city’s support we could do a lot more.

My father and my brothers and I opened a wholesale toy business in 1979. We had been looking for several years for an opportunity to get into our own business.

My father had been a businessman in Hong Kong. He emigrated there from China’s southern Guangdong province in 1949. He had an import-export business in construction machine parts and owned a warehouse in Hong Kong where merchandise was stored as it came off the ships.

I came to the United States in 1968, to study at UCLA and be a physicist. I earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics and was on the verge of getting my Ph.D when I took the summer off to help the family business get started. I got very busy, and I never went back to school.

We evaluated what types of products we should import, and we decided on toys manufactured mostly in Asia--at that time it was Hong Kong and Taiwan. We spoke the languages, we could communicate with the factories; we figured we’d be ahead of the game.

At that time, small retailers only sold toys at Christmastime. The really big toy industry was the domain of a few major corporations, like Mattel. Most importers only dealt with toys on a part-time basis.

We rented warehouse space for $400 a month, and we had no employees at all for the first year.

But the company tripled and quadrupled in the first years because we had such large amounts of sales. The first company we had was called ABC Toys. Five years ago we opened Megatoys, the company that I manage.

Within several years after we started our business, there was a large influx of immigrants into the area.

A lot of them were entrepreneurs from Vietnam, Hong Kong and Taiwan. When they started out, many were penniless. A lot of them got menial labor jobs on the weekdays and then they would go to swap meets on weekends and try to sell items there.

I developed relationships with many of them who were buying toys from me. In the early 1980s, I encouraged some of them to rent warehouses and go into the wholesale business.

I had first rented a space. Then I made money, and I started buying warehouses. As these people approached me, I started buying more warehouses and renting to them.

That’s how Toytown got started, a whole network of small operations all manufacturing and importing toys. Now, it’s a billion-dollar industry clustered around 3rd and 5th streets and San Pedro and Los Angeles streets.

When we first came to this part of Downtown, there were a lot of abandoned warehouses and deserted office buildings. Now, we have visitors coming in from all over the world, from the East Coast, the Midwest, Mexico, South America--even some from Eastern Europe and Russia.

There is such a concentration of toy items here that it’s a lot easier for retailers to come to Los Angeles and get everything they need than for them to go to Hong Kong and China and look for things bit by bit. Everything from all over the Pacific Rim is here in Los Angeles.

I’m always optimistic about the future. Being an immigrant and a business person, I didn’t make it the easy way. If I can make it, other people can overcome the challenges and make it too. That’s what’s unique about L.A., with our diversity and our opportunities.