Boulder™
Meet Boulder – the natural toy dump truck designed to boldly clean up kids playrooms!
Project Information:
Client: Woolkin
Industry: Consumer Products, Environmental Innovation
Services: New Product Development
Key Outcomes:
Product Development
Packaging System
Brand Experience
Manufacturing Pathways
Market & Brand Strategies
We designed Boulder™ to be, well – bolder! We wanted to create an iconic and playful toy dump truck with a natural difference. Boulder™ picks up where others leave off, delivering strong environmental credentials and product stewardship responsibility.
Boulder™ picks up where others leave off, delivering strong environmental credentials and product stewardship responsibility. While uniquely familiar in design, these toys are made from Naturesclip™ - a pure New Zealand wool material we designed and engineered. It’s wool but not as you know it.
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Overview
Dump trucks and construction toys are an elemental part of childhood and play culture. It’s hard to believe over 3.9 million toy dump trucks are sold each year. While kids are drawn to these miniature earth movers, many are made of plastic and do little to move our planet forward. When you understand that nearly 80% of all toys end up in landfill (or ultimately the ocean) – some heavy lifting must be done.
Frame
It’s hard to believe over 3.9 million toy dump trucks are sold each year. Their popularity [unit sales] are higher than the annual birthrate across the entire United States of America, and they generate more than USD $5.8 billion in annual revenues.
While kids are drawn to these miniature earth movers, these toys do little for our planet . More than 8.9 million kilograms of plastic is used each year in the production of these toys, and they have an environmental footprint (measurement of the greenhouse gas emissions) of 12.3 kg of CO2 per toy truck. When you understand that nearly 80% of all toys end up in landfill (or ultimately the ocean), and that toys account for 6% of all landfill plastics worldwide – some heavy lifting must be done to improve this situation.
Our Approach
Boulder™ picks up where others leave off, delivering strong environmental credentials and product stewardship responsibility. While uniquely familiar in design, these toys are made from Naturesclip™ - a pure New Zealand wool material we designed and engineered. It’s wool but not as you know it. Naturesclip™ is strong like a rope, allowing flexibility and strength, which allows us to create unique 3D wool physical forms. Wool neutralizes many common indoor air pollutants at a very high rate, meaning playing with these toys helps purify the air in the nursery. Now that’s heavy duty!
The soft tactility of Naturesclip™ is an important feature of the toy because babies and children begin learning about the world through touch and kinetics (all our motor skills develop by touching the world first, well before we learn how to speak and verbally communicate). The Naturesclip™ used in Boulder™ is visually offset by the natural untreated goodness of FSC certified timber (sourced from forests in Aotearoa which sequester large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere). Accentuating the form beautifully, the combination of wool and wood makes Boulder™ natural, biodegradable and fully renewable.
Outcome
Boulder™ looks cool! It’s chunky, bright, robust, and it feels warm and engaging to touch. It’s your loveable soft toy, reinvented. Boulder™ could well be the world’s most renewable toy dump truck. It’s goal is to help dump plastic - and build a brighter future for all kids!
Our purpose is to enrich the first 100+ days of life for little people. Boulder (and friends) are showing that we can design and manufacture products here in New Zealand, using our own materials, for export around the world. This elevation of design delivers real economic development: creating new markets for our materials, new jobs for our people, and better outcomes for kids.
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