Nov 8, 2007 10:32 am US/Central
Local Co. Keeps Their Wooden Toys Old School
ST. PAUL (AP) ―
-
-
Beka Inc. is a family owned company, started by two brothers and their friends in the 1970s.
CBS
All the recent toy recalls are taking some of the fun out of the holiday gift-giving season. Fears about lead paint and choking hazards have a lot of parents looking for simpler, natural toys.
Each Thursday morning this month, I am showing you some natural toys made and sold here in Minnesota. Today we profiled a toy manufacturer called
Beka Inc., which is in St. Paul.
For 30 years, the folks there have been making toys out of wood, like blocks that kids like to stack. Beka is on Selby Avenue, just east of Dale Street.
It is a family owned company, started by two brothers and their friends in the 1970s. Jamie and Peter Kreisman have about eight workers and sell to a select number of small toy stores and schools around the country.
They use maple to make those ever popular block sets.
"A good set of blocks can be used for many years. First it is a hand-eye coordination kind of thing. Learning how to grasp, how to build, how to move things. Then it gets into stacking. Stacking with blocks for a child is a complex activity," Jamie told me.
Beka also makes puppet theaters. Kids can let their imaginations run wild by drawing on the theater's dry erase board or chalkboard surfaces.
"For me all of our products are generic that encourage creative play. It sounds like jargon, but we are committed to creating toys that don't dictate to a child how they are supposed to play. What we do is develop products that encourage a child to exercise their imagination. A puppet theater to us and kids who use them is not a puppet theater. It's a lemonade stand. It is a grocery store. It's a library check out stand," said Jamie.
Beka's best-selling item is its easel. Two kids can play with it at one time.
"Our easels are large and so the young child can lean on the easel and use it, and the older child, can be more sophisticated with their art and do a variety of things," said Jaime. "Then you put it outside and use watercolors, you do temper paint in the summertime."
Jamie told me they are very picky about which toy stores they sell to. They prefer small specialty toy stores. In fact over the years they have turned down offers to sell to some large toy retailers because it would have required them to make their toys differently.
Jamie told me that he often hears stories of grandparents passing on a toy they bought for their kids to their grandchildren. Wooden toys are very durable, very hard to break.
You can find Beka's products at
Peapods Toy Store in St. Paul, and online.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
Reporting
