In a world inundated by plastic it’s refreshing to find a company creating colourful and durable wooden toys. Indigo Jamm is a rare find indeed. This British based firm offers an eye-catching catalogue of timeless wooden classics including retro-style steam trains, rocket ships and doll’s furniture.
Andrew McGregor, Artiwood Australia’s managing director, recently sat down with Mark Roake, Indigo Jamm’s managing director, to learn more about the company’s origins and its vision for the future.
Roake talks about wooden toys with a passion usually reserved for things like chocolate and global travel. As a former retailer he laments the loss of local stores filled with toys destined to become much loved family heirlooms.
“So many childhood dreams came alive inside these village stores,” he says. “My business partner and I want to keep these memories alive. We’d like future generations to experience the same classic wooden toys we enjoyed as children.”
Roake founded Indigo Jamm with Mike Reeve in 2011. He says Reeve is a formidable toy designer, noting that Indigo Jamm’s toys have won plenty of prestigious industry awards. When McGregor caught up with Roake he was busy reviewing the final samples of Reeve’s latest creations for Christmas 2017.
Flo the UFO caught his eye. This circular wooden dome spacecraft comes complete with two aliens and a spinning time warp disk. Next to Flo was Ricky, a red bull-nose rocket designed to sit vertically on its three launch fins or lie horizontally on its side. It’s clever little design features like these that make Indigo Jamm’s toys rather special.
Its focus on versatile interactive design really comes to the fore in new toys like Toby Truck and Digger Dave. The digger features an adjustable front bucket that children can raise and lower. The bucket can also be twisted around its pivot. A rear back hoe stretches and unfolds with ease. It’s all the kind of functionality that’s normally the preserve of plastic toys.
Indigo Jamm has also chosen to focus on toys for children under the age of three year. Roake acknowledges that designing and manufacturing toys for this age group is a challenge.
“Certification testing is incredibly rigorous. It adds cost and complexity to each toy’s design. As a result, many companies simply do away with the hassle and grade their toys for children over three years.
“We felt this approach to toy design created a unique opportunity. Hascombe House is great example of how we’re filling this gap in the market. It’s a fully furnished doll’s house, complete with peg people, that’s certified safe for children under the age of three years. Other toys like Bernie’s Number Bus and Colin Camper Van are certified for children as young as 12 months.”
Indigo Jamm, including its new toys for Christmas, are now available in Australia. They’re distributed exclusively by Artiwood Australia.
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