been here in the twin cities for a few years we're going to talk about this brand new toy company but tell us a little bit about where you came from how you got your start well you know really you have to go back to my childhood of course to talk about toys so i'm from iowa  like everyone in the twin cities and came up here for college to study theater at hamlin which sort of began my love affair with creativity and how to be a creative person how to do creative things how to build  a creative community so after college i did what every good theater major does i started a theater company oh so you know pulled out my visa card and funded a few shows and had a lot of fun but after doing that for a few years realized that there was an effort time a lot of money in the small theater business to keep that alive and got more into arts and cultural development and really pursued that started as an organization that's now called the arts and culture partnership of st paul and after a while mayor norm coleman at the time i think was sick of me bothering him about arts projects so i became the cultural development director for the city  did that for several years and again this all sort of flowed through this whole idea of sort of the intersection of public policy and creativity so did that for a few years work at mcnally smith college for a few years when off to get my policy degree at harvard came back to work at n p r and after seven years there decided to jump into the unknown and start this take on so we have a brand new baby company that is called play from scratch you're the founder and tell us a little bit about where the idea for this this toys that we're looking at where did it come from you said it came a little bit out of your experience with childhood play it sounds like absolutely you know like all the great ideas i found string this company it wasn't my idea is really my parents idea i vividly remember when i was eight years old my parents gave me a car board box for my birthday and inside the cardboard box there was a roll of tape and some wire and some string that was my birthday present and i remember thinking this is the best present ever because really what it was was an acknowledgement on my parents part that they wanted me to be creative they wanted me to make my own toys and so instead of having to scrounge around the house and find you know dad's duct tape down in the shop and steal it to go make stuff they were giving me to take and so i made all sorts of crazy inventions from that president and then thirty two years later i realized i wanted to do in essence the same thing for my kids so you have small children i do i have a son who's four and a little girl who is one and a half and so you've already you were doing some what he called prototyping or is that sort of part of where the idea for the company came from i mean really it hit me you know they say it's her inspiration strikes and it was a little over a year ago that i was playing with my son and we're just playing with very simple materials tubes and funnels and and having a blast and it made me think about that present i got thirty two years ago and i thought why doesn't someone start a company encouraging kids to do this kind of play this creative play this hands on play with raw materials and that was the day that play from scratch was born i walked downstairs and told my wife i was starting a twenty something and now that makes it sound easy like it's an overnight success but why don't we talk a little bit about some of the steps that you took to actually create a  company you know how did you as you look back on this year how did you put it together the way the reason i called you was because someone mentioned to me you'd put together a great advisory board so it was that one of the one of the elements in putting the company together and who's on that board really that was the the smartest thing that i did when i started and i will say that there are a whole lot of things that i've done over the past year that have not been it's so smart but one of the things i did was start this advisory board and really you know we're playing scratch is a for profit companies very simple we don't need a board but i realize from my nonprofit experience that having a group of people that are the smartest people you can find who have insight in a diversity of opinions and experience in the area that you're trying to solve a problem and we are trying to solve a problem with play from scratch even though we're a for profit i realize that that was one of the best ways to make sure that you stay on track so i put together a group of  board members who are community members there folks with ph d s or people with educational backgrounds or people that are doing this kind of work in different ways people in the nonprofit world the government world the for profit world pull them together and just said hey are you willing to  volunteer little bit of your time to help do this and surprisingly they did and that has been really really fantastic experience and they have pulled me back from the brink a few times of making bad decisions you know i come to them and say hey what do you think of this product and they say you know cool idea that's not play from scratch in mission yet so let's talk a little bit you said it's you know we're trying to solve a problem which is more like a mission vision drish driven company  what what is the why you're here in business for white why are you doing this well part of it i will admit is a frustration with the state of the toy industry you know as a parent my house has been flooded with plastic toys and the more i researched it and discovered the way the toy industry works i discovered that you know eighty percent of the toys in the u s are made in china and we're talking about twenty three billion dollars worth of toys that are sold in the u s every year so it's a lot of toys and the vast majority then are made out of plastic now they're great toys and believe me i love toys and not against toys or house was full of toys and my kids love all sorts of toys not just this stuff and i think it would be unfortunate if this is all there was in the entire world so we're not against toys but what i wanted to do was create an alternative to create something that was different and something that was really focused around sort of four big values and the big the most important one for us is creativity and so we really dug into this notion of how do you play from scratch where you don't really need toys you just find stuff around your house and you make your own choice and that's really where this game was which is what started it all i made twenty four of these prototypes delivered them to all of my friends that had kids about their you know the right age right before christmas last year and they are there with honor all their christmas trees and this game is called go creative the big idea is that you deal two cards very simple and it gives you a challenge a creative challenge so in this case it says build a little bicycle and so you just deal the cards and you say to the kids or adults who have you're playing with the little bicycle and then they build it out of anything they can find around the house like a tape straws you name it after that deal two more cards that says alien and then a pretty ilian so then you build a pretty alien and you can just go on and on and on with this game is there actually many many other ways to play it so that was  foundation creativity and how did what was the feedback you got after because you were i take it you're giving these to your friends for free and yet saying please just try this out you know it was interesting that the best and that we got a lot of feedback and most of it very positive the best feedback i received was from a nine year old girl named winnie and she you know without asking they were on a road trip and i take took the game with them and winnie from the backseat said to her dad just said dad this is a really big game in a really little box and i thought that was pretty great that's pretty cool i was worried about kids that were using the thing like charades they were doing the cards and acting out these these roles so yeah i mean what i heard from people is that it works well and let's talk about why do you think that this idea of play creative creativity in play why do they are they so important to us right now you know it's interesting and i think there's a lot more attention being paid to play than ever before i think for really decades or or more we didn't really think about play it was just that thing that kids did when we're starting to realize and there's a lot of research now emerging around the importance of play and how the way you play helps sort of train your brain for adulthood you know the first and foremost play is practice for adulthood you're playing you're sort of testing boundaries you're figuring things out but more than that and this is something i discovered which part of my career which i completely neglected to mention which i was the technical director at the children's museum way back when and one of the things i discovered when i was at the children's museum is that kids are playing because they want to change the world in little ways they want to see like if i push this will something happen if i change this what does that do  and now watching my children after thousands of hours watching children play the children's museum now watching my children i'm really seeing how true this is that play is a way that children test out their own capacity to make change in the world and so we need to give them the toys in the tools that allow them to do that so many of the toys that we have now don't do that you press a button and it doesn't go on for you oh yeah also holy i mean the toy is more about the adult who designed it than the kid is playing with and these are toys where you're saying to the children you can make anything and if we can teach them that through this kind of play you know what will that mean for them when they're adults right and so too to the average buyer they might look at this and say well now why in the world do i need to buy these things that you've produced for us that you've assembled here so they might go and you know they're going to look at this say oh i i recognize this this is from a water  i'm going to go find the water cooler like this that's what this is right or this is from the gas station and you know it's i don't care for that ok what is what is tell me a little bit about that idea well in some ways again that's part of our mission you know we're trying to teach kids you can make things from everyday objects so we want these objects to be slightly familiar we want them to be things that they see to a certain degree around the house but we also want to make them sort of ready for a lot of different creative play so these are very carefully selected you know the tubes in the tube of tube are much bigger than the tubes that you'll find around your house they're much more sturdy i mean everything we make is designed to be reused over and over and over again these are not toys you're going to buy and then immediately recycle because they are all recyclable you can recycle them we're going to play with them for a long time before that so these are very sturdy sturdy materials the other things so for example a cardboard box and you know really there's a again a lot of attention being paid to cardboard boxes canes arcade was a video that went viral last year after we started play from scratch but what it really was was a great surprise of concept for us about the power of a cardboard box well this is not your average cardboard box looks like a cardboard box but you can actually as a child say well i want to have a hole here and you just press a little and there's a triangle if you want a circle you put a circle there and then you can do the same on the other side you can put tubes through here you can actually fit the boxes into each other so while it is just a cardboard box this is not the same cardboard box that you would get at the store the other thing is cardboard boxes are very expensive if you actually go buy them now again we're always encouraging to play with stuff for a new house do that first have a blast but as far as going out and buying a cardboard box my first prototype of the world famous box of boxes which i made for a four year old across the street it was his birthday i was in a rush i just went and bought it retail because fifty dollars a box of boxes so it has a lot of value to it but it may be mysterious to some about that value what happens when the kids look at let have you had the experience of kids sort of shopping for what you have or is it strictly an adult process at this point i'm just kind of curious about that well that is one of the another strange thing about the toy industry is that the the people who are buying the objects the the products are different than who is be the end user yeah which is unique toys because you have adults and it is primarily moms if you look at the data that they're going out and they are shopping for their kids and the kids play with it now the kids obviously have a lot of feedback in that process and  so it's very interesting to see how kids react to these toys and we kind of have it backwards if you want to talk to a person who really gets how awesome a box of boxes or a tube of tubes is or just a bunch of tape talk to the so yeah the kids really do get this right away i mean i understand what you're saying and i want to go back to the idea of capacity building around creativity when i get to that i want to also come back to being a local company but what it seems to me that what you're really getting at is that there is a lot of possibility here and that you're trying to give children a sense of possibility and engage that possibility into t for them to understand what those tests limit then and if discover things is that is that part of the mission absolutely you know we have this crazy notion that creative toys shouldn't come with instructions and there are a lot of creative toys out there that come with instructions here's how you should do it we don't have instructions we have inspiration inside the tubes and the boxes we have challenges each each product each like this box of boxes has a unique set of three challenges and every single box of boxes has a different set so it gives you like the card will say build a magnificent dragon out of these boxes that's our challenge to them how they build it is completely up to them we're not going to give them a drawing of the magnificent dragon are going to say you know put the tail here and here's what colors the fire should be that's up to them and again give them the materials so you put a lot of these materials in front of them they know how to create kids are naturally created part of our role as adults is really to get out of their way and let them do it to give them that little nudge so they get started in there is a little nudge and we've is there an age range you're promoting are you basically saying this is a sort of whatever age two hundred anyone could want to play with this how do you see your your product in the market on the box that says ages four to one hundred four and part of that is because we're required you know the toy industry is highly regulated we actually have to put an age group on the box the reality is my one year old has a blast with these boxes my one year old loves playing with the tubes you give any child of any age  they're going to have fun with that so really it is all ages there there's been many times that we've tried to narrow that down we've tried to say you know really really what is the age group that is excited about this and then i'm shocked when we hand the stuff to fifteen year olds and they they have a blast they need this kind of thing because it's structured tell us a little bit i want to go back to being a local toy company i know we've had a few toy companies here we use to manhattan toys were here weren't they i don't know where if they even exist anymore but great local toy distributor that started here there are some great products that have come out of the twin cities cuban maze is a fantastic toy product where you put it is basically a maze for marbles but there cubes beautiful done by local architects so there's a tradition in the twin cities is a very good has been made that it's always been a creative environment but and as you thought about those hurt i mean you've got some principles you decided to locate were delighted that i'm part of the creative enterprise zone that is at university in two eighty rating out from there you've located right in the zone and sure you didn't know that that the time where but we're trying to actually promote more local manufacturing businesses what are some of the other principles you're incorporating and know you've got recycle all materials what else is about what are some other qualities of the company that are important to you well one of the in a really wonderful almost accidental things that's happened over the  course of the years that you know we started looking at manufacturing you know we wanted to make these raw materials kits so we started looking at where we could source these raw materials my wife one night had this idea again all the good ideas came from other people she said well what if we made it all out of recycled and recyclable materials everything well that's crazy i mean i've been to toy fair i had seen how the toy industry works i knew that really there's a well worn path between here and china in that plastic is really the material of choice for obvious reasons durable it can make that trip all of that about a week later i realized she was absolutely right you know that we wanted you know from a values perspective to create a company that didn't have a huge carbon footprint a company that allowed for toys to be recycled you know a toy that's durable and can last a long time you can play for play with it over and over again but at the end of its lifespan it's not going into a landfill and that took us to cardboard and paper and there's really not a better place you could be located than the twin cities when it comes to sourcing and manufacturing using cardboard and paper so ninety percent of what we sell is made not just in minnesota it's made locally it's made in the twin cities hundred percent recycled material in the first place and then you can recycle them you know at the end of its useful life they're very very local co op and so what do you see as the challenges obviously you want to make some some success right now in this prime shopping season you're hoping for some sales for christmas i assume and i think getting some great publicity how are you keeping up and getting some orders and what's taken off you know it's it's great and  you know obviously more sales would be awesome but we have met and surpassed you know our goals far beyond what we anticipated starting you know just a little over a week ago so the orders are coming in the product is moving out the door you know i think the real challenge for us is that we're really something different there's no one else really so we have found out there in the twenty history doing exactly this there are some fantastic companies that are doing  encouraging kids to play with raw materials there's one based in australia cut called make to which encourages kids to play with boxes using plastic connectors that's awesome as far as this product using raw materials in play and using recycled and recyclable durable materials we think we're the we're the first doing this so now it's just about making sure people know that and so you know you did this press release it quits it and only i called you the same day you were putting out the press  great i'm glad the timing was good i know you've gotten some other press what where do you think people are going how far are you is your basic going so far are you getting orders out of state or are they initially just from minnesota right now you know it's fascinating to watch and one of the things that's so exciting after a year of work and hard work and you know pitfalls and i mean believe me i never realized how much work starting a business like this would be as you know to get or you know that first order comes in and you realize you know the first order for us was from a friend in baltimore oh and i like ok wow wow and we were shipping things to baltimore then dealing with shipping you know we're shipping the stuff all over so we're having to manage that that was another challenge but the orders are coming from all over i mean a lot of them in minnesota but you know yesterday we took an order from someone in brooklyn who was giving it as a gift to someone in san francisco oh nice and you know one of the really amazing tools that we have is social media  purchasers of toys the adults the moms and dads uncles aunts grandparents they're very connected through social media so that for us is going to be a very important way to have really a two way conversation with with our we really don't call them customers i love it that you're calling them co creators that's really an empowerment message and i think that's great there is a little i believe there's a little video on your website that shows it with you and your it has part of your story it's at you with your children in the bath tub or something or when i was taking the video with photon of actually this one with my might say future prominently but you know we just had a ton of kids in the warehouse and we were playing with with the stuff and watching you know this sort of magnificent mayhem that comes when you put this kind of material in front of kids i mean they just again they're almost unstoppable yeah and so i think that i would recommend that people who are who look at this in kind of go really that's what i'm going to buy but i know that i remember one time when i was first taking my daughter an airplane the recommendation was strips of paper a ziploc bag with strips of paper paper clips taped and i think maybe you could have scissors that i don't know but anyway but it was absolutely the best thing i ever took on the road with her and it's such a similar concept it's basically makes make your own stuff by having them a few tools and keep them occupied but you know you're you're encouraging people to piece things together be in dialogue be and be an interaction it's interactive play and then it's it's building that creative capacity well you know that but the reality is that the world is full of toys and we're the ones you know we grownups make the distinction between things that are toys and not toys and you know obviously safety is very important and you know our toys are tested like all other toys we have to send them off and they're tested and and you know extraordinarily safe but bigger than that you know we need to think about the fact that you know my one and a half year old daughter doesn't understand the difference between something that's a toy and something that's not a toy right we train them that there are things that are toys and toys and i think we need to also train kids and know the realities that you can you know one of the best toys in our home is a couch cushion we're constantly stripping the couch and making mountains and forts and you know these really fantastic thing yeah exactly it's all that it's all that process and imagination all of our fit my favorite book is a house of your own it's a really old old old book and it was all these examples of how you create a house of your own when daddy's reading the newspaper this is how old it is right he's in a house of his own you know and it's the same thing making those cushions out and that's that's when people feel a sense of empowerment i know another thing about i when i think about what you're building for the future in addition to a great company is adults who play well are going to be great employees daniel pink's research and dr as well as his earlier book a whole new mind talks about play as an essential quality for the next century essentially the one we're in so it's it seems to me that you've got you could be early get some more endorsements if you will from people the corporate world that says you know we need more kids to play like this i mean have you thought of i assume something very advisory board members are there in part for that reason that they're seeing the potential of the kind of adult crating absolutely and one of my advisors is now retired but was a vice president at three am and something that he likes to talk about is how you know they ask engineers at three m you know how did you play as a child you know tell us about growing up and something that they really love hiring farm kids and really one of those reasons kids farm kids had to learn how to solve problems with their hands and so you know this is the way you play as a child matters a lot to the way you work as an adult and i do think you're absolutely right play really matters as an adult is as well i mean i find that my level of creativity engagement with the world is so different now that i'm you know often all the time playing with my kids yeah and i take that to the workplace and i think a lot of workplaces could benefit from more play you know it's christmas season so people are buying so how are they going to get to this product and there's plenty of time to get it p the holidays absolutely you know the play from scratch dot com light and scrap is where you can buy the products and so you know i should just say that over and over again play from scratch dot com that's also where you can engage with us where we won again everyone to share with us you know not only how did the how do you like the product take a picture of what they created and found it fun yeah and that's what i'm really getting excited about you know one of the one of the things about launching in december is that we have a lot of presence there going under christmas trees which we're not going to see those pictures til next month and i can't wait we'll put them up so that's all we have time for this week come join us again next week on the phone call form