A note from the founder
The wagon was for the children.
Then their father got in it.
That is more or less how this shop started. We spent the first long year of the pandemic at the LA Arboretum. We brought the wagon. What started as a way to get through the day became something else: Rashid rode in it, convincing our daughters to push him down the garden paths. Then I did too. We were two adults being surprised into play by our own children.
It changed how we thought about childhood and play. What we wanted was open-ended, natural, and made by human hands. So I went looking, and then wrote to the people I found. Among them were a workshop in Germany, a women-led felting workshop in Nepal, a doll maker in Romania, and a family in Poland. I asked whether they would sell to two people in Los Angeles who had never run a shop. Some replied. Some did not. All four have been with us since 2021.
I did not mind the looking. Before the shop I spent two years in a Cairo archive, deciphering Ottoman court ledgers in a hand few people can still read, looking for a single name. Nobody does that work, which is why what I found was still there to find.
Almost none of our makers can sell to a school. They are two people, or five, or a dozen. They cannot write a quote or file a W-9. They cannot wait sixty days to be paid. Some need paying before the work begins. So the only way to buy them was one at a time, without a purchase order. Some classrooms can manage that. Most public ones cannot.
The children who get the most from these materials are often the ones least likely to meet them. They are children still finding their words, and children whose hands settle them before anything else can. Those children are in every kind of classroom. Most of them are in public ones.
So we became the vendor they cannot be, one company standing in for forty. We do the quotes, the vendor files, the terms, the customs paperwork, and the production slots held months ahead. None of it is glamorous, and it is the reason a classroom does not have to go looking.
A piece made by hand arrives with the person who made it still attached. That is worth the paperwork.
Irfana
Irfana Hashmi, Ph.D. · Social historian · Founder and Director of the Educator Program
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