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 -