I went looking for good toys. I left empty-handed.
It started with a trip to a toy shop.
I was with my eight-year-old, picking out birthday presents for his twin brothers who had just turned one. Simple enough. We walked in, and within minutes I felt a sinking feeling.
Aisle after aisle of flashing, beeping, battery-powered plastic. Toys in colours that do not exist in nature. Packaging designed to shout louder than the shelf next to it. I picked things up, turned them over, looked for something I could feel good about giving my kids. A material I recognised. A name I could trace back to somewhere real.
We left without buying anything.
That evening, I started making notes. Not with a business plan in mind, just with a genuine question I could not shake: why is it so hard to find toys I would be proud to give my kids?
The problem with most toys
I have three children. I have bought a lot of toys. And like a lot of parents, I have watched most of them break, be forgotten, or end up in a bin bag within months.
The average plastic toy lasts around three months before it heads to landfill. Three months. And yet the shelves are full of them, marketed as essentials, priced to feel disposable, and bought in good faith by parents who just want their kids to have something good to play with.
It is not that parents do not care. Most do, deeply. The problem is that finding something genuinely well-made, responsibly sourced, and built to outlast the phase it was bought for takes real effort. You have to dig. You have to research. You have to hope the words on the packaging actually mean something.
Most of the time, they do not.
The toy that gave us our name
There is a rocking horse in my family called Tollers.
He was bought from Harrods in the 1930s and later donated to my family by a neighbour who wanted to see him loved rather than lost. My great grandparents had 11 children at home. It felt like the right fit.
Repainted and repaired more times than anyone can count, Tollers has been played with by more than 30 children across four generations. He has survived decades of rough treatment, house moves, and the kind of play only a large family can deliver. He still looks good. He still works. He is still bringing joy.
That is what a toy should be.
When I was searching for a name for this brand, the answer had been in my family the whole time. Tollers is everything we are trying to offer: quality that outlasts the trend, craftsmanship that holds up to real life, and the kind of toy worth passing down rather than throwing away.
What Tollers is trying to fix
I am not trying to lecture anyone about their buying choices. That is not what this is.
What I am trying to do is make the right choice easier.
When I started researching the market properly, I found a real gap. The big toy retailers were beginning to stock a handful of wooden or sustainable products, but they sat alongside thousands of other things, and the sourcing credentials and build quality were often vague at best. At the other end, there were small independent makers doing brilliant work, but often hard to find unless you already knew where to look.
Nobody was sitting in the middle, doing the curation work properly, and making it simple to shop.
That is where Tollers fits.
Every toy on this site has been chosen by parents of young kids. It has to meet a clear product framework before it makes the cut: no screens, no batteries, sustainable materials, non-toxic, built to last, and wherever possible made in the UK or Europe. If it does not meet those criteria, it does not go on the site. Simple as that.
We are not a corporate brand. We are not trying to stock everything. We would rather carry 70 products we believe in than 700 we are not sure about.
The early days
Building Tollers around a full-time job running a marketing agency, with three young children at home, was not straightforward.
But I had started a business before. I knew what the early months looked like. And I was genuinely passionate about this one in a way that made the long evenings easier.
The twins were not sleeping well at the time. So I used the early hours to research suppliers, test products, and build the foundations of what Tollers would become. The product sampling process alone was an education. We had Elou cork blocks in our house for months before they went on the site. I watched them get chewed, thrown, stacked, and at one point lobbed out of a window. They still looked brand new. That is when I knew they had earned a place.
Every product on this site has been through something similar. Not in a lab. In a home, with real kids, in real conditions.
This is just the beginning
We are still early. There is a lot more to come: more brands, more products, and more of the story we want to tell.
But the purpose behind Tollers has not changed since that evening I left the toy shop empty-handed.
Because our kids deserve better than cheap plastic and empty promises. They deserve toys made with care, from materials that can be named, by people who take their craft seriously.
That is what we are here to offer.
Want to know more about how we choose what goes on the site? Find out more about us.
Ready to find something your child will love for years? Shop the collection.
