Plaything
Toy Designer & Inventor · Est. 2014
Where Clay
Becomes Canon.
02 / The Process
Four frames.
One obsession.
From napkin to shelf in the fewest possible compromises.
01 / 04
The Napkin Sketch
Every toy starts as a bad drawing.
A 2am scrawl. Proportions wrong, limbs too long, eyes too big. But the character is already alive in the crooked lines — waiting to be excavated from the paper.
02 / 04
The Digital Sculpt
Wireframe to solid in 72 hours.
The sketch becomes a 3D mesh. Topology dialed for injection moulding tolerances. Turntable renders sent to the client by Thursday morning — before the brief even settles.
03 / 04
The Prototype
Tested by paint-stained hands.
Resin print, foam core, hand-painted in the studio. Passed to six children under eight. Whatever survives three hours of imaginative destruction gets a production ticket.
04 / 04
The Shelf
A child's hand reaches for it.
Retail-ready packaging. SKU assigned. Planogram approved. But none of that matters as much as the blur of a small hand stretching across the aisle toward exactly this toy.
03 / Shipped Products
Six toys on shelves.
Dozens more in the pipeline.
Each one earned its place by surviving a three-year-old.
04 / What They Say
The toys speak.
But so do the clients.
She handed us a prototype that our focus group kids refused to give back. That's the only metric that matters, and she nailed it on the first pass. The mould went to production twelve days after the brief.
Marcus Teller
Senior Product Manager · Spin Master
I scouted 40 designers at Nuremberg last year. Plaything was the only one who understood that a great toy character has to read at three metres from a shelf — silhouette first, colour story second, detail third. That hierarchy is rare.
Lieselotte van Acker
Licensing Director · Brandworks International
We needed a character designer who could think in three dimensions from the first sketch. Not someone who'd design a flat illustration and hope it translated to plush. Plaything's process is built backwards from the toy — every decision serves the object.
Priya Mehrotra
Creative Director · Quirk Press
05 / Commission
You've watched
the short film.
Now meet the director. Commissions open for Q3 2026 — a limited slate of four projects. Brief-to-prototype in six weeks or the deposit refunds.
Download the Lookbook
No scope forms. No rate cards. Just a conversation about what you want to build.