How to Not Get Screwed by Suppliers?
Most buyers who get burned by a supplier are not unlucky. They were sold on a price before they had verified anything, and the failure was structural: no written specification, no inspection, no stated starting point for the delivery date, and a deposit paid against a promise. Sourcing risk is manageable, but only in a […]
What the Heck is Pickleball, and Why’s It Got Such a Weird Name?
The name is the least interesting thing about pickleball and the thing everybody asks about, so it is worth settling first. The popular answer — that it is named after a dog called Pickles — is almost certainly wrong. The better-supported answer is that it comes from “pickle boat”, a rowing term for a crew […]
What Are the Best Simple Games?
“Simple” is a word that gets used loosely in this category, so it is worth defining before recommending anything. A game is simple if a new player can be playing within sixty seconds of picking it up, without a demonstration and without reading anything. By that test, a lot of games sold as simple are […]
What Are Your Tips for Building Wooden Toys That Don’t Suck?
Most wooden toys that fail, fail for one of five reasons, and four of them are decided at the design stage rather than in production. The toy splits along a glue line, a wheel comes off, the finish wears through at a corner, a small part comes loose, or the whole thing warps after a […]
How Long Does It Take to Create a Wooden Garden Game?
Most buyers asking this question have a date they need to hit, and most suppliers answer with a single number that turns out to be optimistic. The honest answer is a range, because the timeline depends on four things: whether the design is new, whether new tooling is needed, how long the sample round takes, […]
What Are the Top 10 Best Selling Wooden Garden Games?
Lists of “best selling” garden games are usually assembled from guesswork. This one is not. It is built from our own order book: the ten products our customers reorder most often, in roughly the order they reorder them. That is a narrower claim than “the market’s top ten”, and a more useful one, because it […]