From Sketch to Shelf: How a Tender Leaf Toy Is Made

Pick up a Tender Leaf toy and turn it over in your hands. Run your thumb across the smooth grain of the rubber wood. Notice the weight — solid, satisfying, real. Look at the paint: soft, contemporary colours applied with just enough coverage to let the natural wood show through. Spot the small details — a tiny printed face, a delicate leaf shape, a door that actually opens.

Every one of those details was chosen. Every curve was drawn, debated, redrawn, and refined. Every colour was mixed, tested, and approved before a single toy left the workshop. The journey from first idea to finished product is longer, more deliberate, and more personal than most people realise.

Here’s how it happens.

It Starts with Danielle

Every Tender Leaf toy begins in the sketchbook of Danielle Hanson, our creative director and the person behind every product ThreadBear Design has ever made. Danielle’s background is unusual for a toy designer. She started her career at the BBC, working in graphic design and moving image. She then trained as an art teacher and spent twelve years teaching A-level graphic design, running an after-school art club on the side. After that, she spent over a decade as creative director for a wooden toy company before founding ThreadBear Design with Nick Shirley, whose expertise lies in the textile and gift industry.

That combination of visual training, years spent watching how children actually play, and a deep love of craft and illustration runs through every toy she creates. “I want children to discover quirky details that make my designs different,” Danielle says. Her influences are eclectic — children’s book illustration, Scandinavian design, the Montessori and Reggio Emilia educational philosophies, and a family heritage of Swiss carpenters and Spanish tailors.

The design process always starts by hand. Danielle sketches, researches, and illustrates before anything goes near a computer. She thinks about how a child will hold the toy, what they’ll notice first, how the play will unfold. She thinks about the parents too — toys should look beautiful in a home, not just in a toy shop.

The Hardest Part: Keeping It Simple

Ask Danielle about her biggest design challenge and the answer is immediate: simplicity. “The biggest challenge is keeping the designs simple,” she says. “Simple design is usually cheaper to produce — which is better for parents — but complexity creeps in. Paring it down is difficult but necessary work.”

This is a principle that runs through the entire Tender Leaf range. The best toys look effortless, but that effortlessness is the result of many rounds of revision. A shape is tweaked until it sits in a child’s hand just right. A colour palette is edited until it feels warm but not garish. A mechanism is refined until it works smoothly for small, clumsy fingers. Simple doesn’t mean easy. It means that every unnecessary thing has been removed.

From Drawing to Sample

Once a design is finalised on paper, it moves into technical drawing and then to sample-making. Danielle works directly with the production team at Mentari International — the family-run factory in Indonesia that manufactures every Tender Leaf and Mentari toy. The ThreadBear team visits the factory for around two months every year, working alongside the makers to develop, test, and perfect new products.

A toy typically goes through a couple of rounds of design and sample-making before it’s approved. The first sample reveals what works and what doesn’t — a piece might be too fiddly for small fingers, a colour might look different on wood than it did on screen, a joint might need reinforcing. Each issue is solved, the sample is remade, and the process continues until everything is right.

This isn’t remote, arms-length manufacturing. It’s a close, personal partnership. The Mentari factory team are, as Danielle puts it, “like family.” The factory provides dependable employment for hundreds of local villagers and operates with high standards of training, wellbeing, and respect. Both Mentari and Tender Leaf hold the ICTI Ethical Toy Program seal of approval.

The Making

The raw material is SVLK-certified reclaimed rubber wood — timber from rubber trees that have reached the end of their latex-producing life. Every tree used is replaced with a new sapling. You can read more about this in our rubberwood blog.

In the factory, the rubber wood is cut, shaped, sanded, and assembled by skilled craftspeople. The painting is done by hand, using water-based, non-toxic paints in the soft, contemporary colour palette that has become Danielle’s signature. Every toy is individually quality-checked before it leaves the workshop.

The attention to detail at this stage is remarkable. A dolls house has tiny window frames that open. A play kitchen  has knobs that turn and doors that swing. A set of wooden animals has hand-painted eyes and markings that give each figure its own character. These details don’t happen by accident. They happen because someone cared enough to get them right.

Safety Testing

Before any toy goes into production, it undergoes rigorous safety testing to meet EN71 (European), ASTM (American), and AS/NZ ISO (Australian and New Zealand) standards. These tests cover everything from the toxicity of the paint to the strength of the joints, the size of small parts, and the sharpness of edges.

Danielle puts it simply: “We know they are fun to play with, but we have to be sure they are completely safe and durable.” Every toy carries the CE marking, and every material used — from the wood to the paint to the glue — is tested and certified. This matters more than most parents realise, and it’s one of the things that distinguishes a properly made wooden toy from the cheaper alternatives that flood online marketplaces.

Packaging With Purpose

The final stage of the journey is packaging, and it’s one we think about as carefully as the toy itself. Every Tender Leaf product is wrapped in plastic-free, biodegradable packaging — recycled cardboard boxes with soy-based ink printing. No blister packs, no cable ties, no cellophane. When a child opens the box, everything inside can be recycled or composted.

The packaging is also designed to be beautiful. Danielle illustrates many of the box designs herself, and the colour palette matches the toys inside. It’s packaging you don’t feel you need to hide, and it’s one of the things independent retailers tell us they love — it looks as good on the shelf as the toy does out of the box. Browse the full plastic-free collection to see for yourself.

Why It Matters

In a world of mass-produced, anonymous products, knowing the story behind the things you buy feels increasingly important. When you give a child a Tender Leaf toy, you’re not just giving them something to play with. You’re giving them something that was drawn by a designer who spent twelve years watching how children play. Something that was carved and painted by hand in a family-run workshop. Something made from a tree that was replanted. Something packaged without plastic. Something tested, checked, and cared about at every stage.

That’s the journey from sketch to shelf. It’s longer than most, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

To learn more about Danielle and her design philosophy, visit Meet the Designer or read our full Q&A with Danielle. To see the full range of toys she’s created, explore the Tender Leaf Toys collection.

Designed in England. Handcrafted with care.

Every Tender Leaf toy is designed by Danielle and made from sustainably sourced rubberwood.

Shop Tender Leaf Toys    •    Meet the Designer    •    Our Sustainability Story