The Politics of Play | Edmonton based toy designer isn’t a one toy wonder

How Matthew Hiebert's imagination is helping to build better citizens

Sep 1, 2010

by Annalise Klingbeil

For 34-year-old Edmonton toy designer Matthew Hiebert, it all started with an old bike reflector. “I was in love with it and I really wanted it. My father said he wouldn’t just give it to me to carry around. He said he would only give it to me if I made something with it,” Hiebert says.

Hiebert didn’t disappoint his father. By gluing the bike reflector to “a hunk of two-by-four” and attaching strings to it, Hiebert managed to fashion himself a robot. That same philosophy of unstructured play is at the heart of Twig, the former elementary school teacher’s award-winning toy.

An “update on traditional building blocks,” Twig is a set of 72 brightly coloured wooden pieces of various sizes and shapes that, when combined with a fertile imagination, can be turned into just about anything.

“Intentionally there is no goal … there is no right way to play,” Hiebert says of his toys. “The idea is that you just dump them on the floor and play with them.” The wooden blocks are capable of being turned into complicated forms, but their beginnings are downright simple.

Sitting in his living room, surrounded by a variety of homemade creations that include lampshades he tissue-papered with his son, Hiebert explains that he was raised by parents who approached the world as raw material that children should “mess around with.”

In late 2006, Hiebert was working on a project in Beijing, and his wife, Ellen Huang, was pregnant with their first child. Shopping for toys for his unborn son inspired him to pay attention to toy design. Before long, his notebook was full of sketches, and he was in the right place to take them one giant step closer to reality.

“In China … the distance between having an idea and setting up manufacturing for it is really short. It’s not difficult to do,” Hiebert says, who turned his sketches into a “cobbled together prototype” and found a reputable factory through online classifieds.

The new family returned home to Canada in the summer of 2007, and Twig was launched on Etsy.com, an online marketplace for homemade goods, in the fall of the same year. A positive customer review on a parenting blog caught the attention of Fat Brain Toys, a Nebraska-based toy retailer, and before long Twig was licensed and officially launched at the gift shop of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Parent Choice Gold Award, considered the toy industry’s equivalent of an Academy Award, followed in 2009.

Hiebert’s not a one-toy wonder either. Goodwood Deconstruction Blocks, his latest creation, feature more advanced designs than Twig but share the same underlying philosophy and provide the same type of play experience. It’s clearly a winning philosophy, given that the Goodwood blocks won a 2010 Dr. Toy award for best vacation product.

But despite the success he has enjoyed, Hiebert still describes his toy-building business as “just a side thing.” “It’s not like I was relying on [Twig] to feed my family or anything,” he says. Instead, he balances his passion for play with a full-time consulting job, his work on a doctoral degree in education at the University of Calgary and the demands of a growing family.

The upside of that delicate balance is that it allows Hiebert to grow his business at a more deliberate pace, rather than frantically chasing opportunities to cash in and sell out. “Since I already have a day job and I’m admittedly not really into the business side of things, the idea behind the toys is to create products that foster healthy development in children,” he explains.

As such, Hiebert sees his company, Aroundsquare Ltd., as an enterprise whose success is determined as much by its social utility as its profitability. Both Goodwood Blocks and Twig are made at reputable factories, and the sustainable toys come in simple packaging that contains neither instructions nor an end goal.

The politics that inform Hiebert’s approach to doing business aren’t limited to a belief in ethical sourcing and environmental sustainability. In fact, politics are at the very core of his mission as a toy builder, as he believes that something as simple as playing freely with brightly coloured building blocks or creating a robot out of a bike reflector and string, can teach children how to make decisions for themselves. In the long run, those lessons help to build better citizens. “If you see the world as raw material and kind of malleable,” he says, “then it naturally moves into things like citizenship where you feel like you can actually make a difference in your world.”