How Coodoo started
A square, a triangle, and the discovery that a child will rebuild the same house eleven times if the pieces hold at the angle they were left at.
We started with one complaint, and it was our own. The building toys in the house either did nothing on their own or did everything for you. A bin of blocks needs a grown up to suggest something. A toy with a button needs nobody at all. What was missing was the thing in between: a piece that gives a child one honest rule and then gets out of the way.
The rule is the edge
A magnetic tile has exactly one rule, and a three year old works it out in about four seconds. Edges pull. Faces do not. Everything after that is theirs. Nobody has to explain a buttress to a child who has watched a fifth storey lean over twice.
That rule is also why the making is fussy. The magnets have to turn inside their housings, or two tiles meet the wrong way round and push apart, and a child who gets pushed apart twice puts the box down. The shells have to hold at the seam, because a tile that comes open is a tile that is finished. Twelve of our 34 boxes state sealed edges, and three run eight magnets to a block where six is the usual count.
What we make now
The catalogue runs to 34 boxes across five shelves. The plain shapes are still the ones we would hand over first. The rest exist because a pile of squares stops being interesting after a fortnight, and what restarts it is a silhouette nobody has: a jointed dinosaur, a castle wall, a portal. Those all sit on the same square base, so they land in the pile rather than starting a second one.
The craft kits are the odd ones out and we know it. A marbling tray is not a building tile. They are here because the same child who builds for an hour will also sit at a table and dye a flower, and we would rather make that thing than pretend the floor is the only place anything happens.
How this site works
This is our catalogue, not our till. Each box has a button that opens that product page at our retail partner, and everything about the money happens there, on the terms shown at their checkout. What we do here is describe what is in the box, count what is on the label, and say which one we would hand over first.
Anything we have worked out that did not fit on a product page is in the build notes. If something here is wrong, write to us: the address reaches the people who made the thing.
Back to the floor
Five shelves of boxes, and four questions that narrow them down.