It’s easy to understand why a lot of companies decide to have their products made overseas in Asia and, more specifically, China.  Your product can be made cheaper and can therefore be more competitively priced.  The day-to-day operations are handed over to someone else.  It all sounds good until you realize the true cost of making such a move.

One of the main questions to ask is ‘who pays the real price of producing your product so cheaply?’.  It is the worker (often the child worker) who works for a pittance with no health benefits or job security.  And what are you giving up?  Control.  No longer are you able to oversee all the details that make your product special, to know for certain where all your materials originate, that specifications are being honoured and that quality control is being maintained.

That’s why TymeAgain toys will continue to be made in the U.K.  It is where we can maintain our standards, reward our craftmakers well, and access materials from the most environmentally responsible sources we can find.  We make safe, well-built toys, and manage their creation from beginning to end.  We are proud to make our toys in England, and proud to say that that will never change.

That’s right.  You heard it here.  TymeAgain toys need no instructions.

I don’t know about you but when something comes with a novel-sized book of instructions, I inwardly groan.   I’ll admit to being technically challenged – I can no longer work the remote for the TV because it is attached to so many other electronic gadgets (does anyone else even still use the term ‘electronic’?).  It’s bad enough to have to wade through instructions to be able to work the can opener (it was a gift); but for toys! Who wants to tell a child what they ‘should’ be doing with it, or how they ‘should’ be playing with it?   And, if a toy does come with instructions, it usually points to limited use instead of open-ended play.   You don’t need instructions to play with a sword or a wand. There’s no right or wrong way to play with a pile of wooden blocks.  There’s no need to explain how a real toy functions.  Isn’t that the beauty of it, really?   That children are left to their own devices to play with that toy however they choose.   Isn’t that what real play is all about?  It fits right in with the new Slow Toy Movement (more about that in later posts).

If there WERE instructions for our toys, this is what they would look like -

TymeAgain and Carlo’s Bakery (of Cake Boss fame) have something in common – they are both family run businesses.   What does it mean when you have family members working together in a business?  Well, it means you are all invested in doing the best job you can.  It means you are used to depending on each other – you know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and you can ‘read’ each other when you need to. It also means you can cover for each other, hold each other to a high standard and just expect more than you would from a regular co-worker or employee.

left to right - Peter with son, Stephen (TymeAgain North America) and Ben with son, Will (TymeAgain UK).

So how can you find people to work for you who ‘feel like family’?  It’s easy – find people who care about the same things that you do.  When it comes to making TymeAgain toys, Ben and his wife Hellyn prefer to hire parents and grandparents because then when he says to them ‘don’t give me anything you’ve made that you would want to hand to your child/grandchild to play with’, they know exactly what he means and quality is assured.  He chooses his craftspeople carefully and takes the time to have a relationship with each one of them personally.  That’s why he has three generations of one family working for him. It’s the way companies used to operate but is a rarity today when so many of the things we use are mass produced.  It’s just one more reason why we think we’re special.

When Ben started TymeAgain, it was because he couldn’t find any wooden role play toys for his boys.  So he started to create something that looked like it could have been made by your grandfather in the garden shed. Your granddad would say, ‘There you go, lad.  Now that’s a sword!’.  After many attempts, he designed something that was realistic looking in a distinctive way, and his boys loved it.  Then he started making them for friends and neighbours and, before long, TymeAgain was born.

Fast forward 17 years and Ben, with his wife Hellyn, now produce British heritage toys for the gift stores of National Trust, English Heritage, Historic Scotland, historic palaces (including the Tower of London) and castles throughout the British Isles and Europe.  Ben still spends part of each day in the workshop because it’s what he loves to do.

TymeAgain is the kind of company that most people don’t believe exists anymore – a company that is uncompromising in their standards, who put care and pride in everything they do.  It’s a philosophy that everyone here at TymeAgain North America subscribes to and, it may sound hokey and old fashioned, but we believe that’s what customers still want.