Developed from an imaginary concept, ticotico creates wooden toys which seek to stimulate children’s creative thinking and provide them a superlative childhood.
Since the conceptual design of each piece till its final production, the choice for environmentally friendly materials – wood, recycled paper, water based inks – and carefully handmade craft pieces.
Ticotico is born from a set of childhood references and memories. As a child, I often remember prioritising my mother’s, carefully preserved throughout the years, older toys. Although raised in the 90s, together with Pinypon, Barbie and later on the Polly Pockets, I could never give up on playing with some wooden furniture and metal sheet stove with my dolls. There has always been a special magic around those objects.
Linked to these nostalgic feelings, it became essential to prioritise an environmental aspect in each of our materials. In a plastic polluted world, using natural resources in a mindful way is part of our DNA. Therefore, the wood used to produce our toys comes from sustainable forests.
Following these guidelines, it become even more important to embrace the ancient wooden toy handmade techniques, rooted in the Portuguese culture, and create modern, minimalist design objects. This simplicity, translated in well-known geometrical shapes, seeks to kindle the creational mindset of the younger generation, which by playing with a wheeled rectangle can easily assume the role of a bus driver.
By matching our toys with several driver license booklets, this imaginary mindset can be further explored. Our drivers, captain’s, pilots, can explore this asset by writing their names, renovating their license and even deploy a foldable road, track or ocean which suggest the beginning of a journey.
Motivated to offer each child an unique experience, ticotico is born in a little workshop, where each drawing, cut, sand, paint is carefully and manually done. Our concepts are slowly shaped to its final identities by using some simple tools and machinery.
From all the tools used in our work shop, a prominent place must be given to our jigsaw “tico-tico”. Not only it is one of our favourite wooden cutting tool, it also inspired us in our branding creation. In this mixture between our brand origin and the tolls used to produce our toys, we reproduce the idea of memory and repetition, often part during childhood plays and education.
Not only we execute each of the pieces that are part of a toys carefully, we put special care in selecting each of the materials that fall into its production. As an example, the paint used to light up our toys, is part of a patented environmentally friendly composition which complies with the European Norms regulating Toy safety directives (EN71-3). This singularity excludes a wide range group of toxic substances, thus offering more safety to our toys and reducing our ecologic footprint.
