A former pilot sets up in Turin.

Quercetti grew out of one man’s workshop. Italian Wikipedia says the company was founded in Turin in 1950 by Alessandro Quercetti, who had grown up in the city after being born in Recanati. In a May 2021 report, Il Sole 24 Ore described him as a former aircraft pilot who moved to the Piedmontese capital and started a toy factory in the post-war years.

The first success was a mechanical toy. Italian Wikipedia, drawing on a 2013 feature in Sette, the Corriere della Sera magazine, says that in December 1950 Quercetti built the Cavallo Galoppa, a spring-driven galloping horse with a rider, with the Turin firm Lenci making the head and jacket. The same account says the business first traded under the name Hopla, and that its early catalogue added sulky-racing and derby variants of the horse.

Flight shaped much of what followed. Italian Wikipedia says Quercetti developed the Tor, a toy rocket launched by an elastic catapult that released a parachute for its return, around 1959 and 1960, followed in 1961 by the Mach-X, a launch-ramp version that dropped a capsule as well as the rocket by parachute. Later lines listed there include the Georello gear-building set of 1972, the Rami and Pallino games of the 1980s, and the SkyRail suspended marble run of 2003.

A French mosaic becomes an Italian name.

The product most associated with the name came from France. Italian Wikipedia says a peg mosaic called Coloredo, presented at the Paris fair in 1946, combined a perforated board with coloured pegs to be pushed into it following printed guide patterns. It says that in 1953 Alessandro Quercetti took on distribution of the game in Italy, paid to patent it there, and at the same time created the Quercetti trademark, which was preferred to Hopla from then on.

According to the same account, the company at first sold the French assortment in Italian boxes branded Quercetti, then moved production into plastic: first the peg itself, with a rounded head and a square stem, and then the perforated board. Pegs in several head diameters followed, along with a square format, so that pictures could be built in more or less detail. Italian Wikipedia says that in 1984 the owners of the Coloredo name sold it to the French firm Jeux Nathan, and that Quercetti then renamed its version Fantacolor.

The pegs have also had a life outside the playroom. Italian Wikipedia says the Florentine artist Antonio Bueno used Quercetti pegs for portraits in the mid-1960s, and that one such work is held by the GAM, Turin’s modern art gallery. In 2016 Artribune reported on Pixel Art editions of the pegs made for the Uffizi and the Museo Egizio, and in May 2021 the Turin edition of Corriere della Sera reported on the artist Antonio Marciano making portraits with the smallest Quercetti pegs. la Repubblica’s Turin edition marked sixty years of the pegs in October 2014.

The company has also worked with outside licences and partners. Italian Wikipedia says that in the 1960s Quercetti made magnetic boards after a distribution deal with the British firm Mettoy, sold Husky die-cast cars in Italy under the same relationship, and became the Italian distributor of Spirograph from 1967. In-house, it lists the Nogi construction system of 1968 and a line of simple plastic toy aeroplanes that drew on the founder’s interest in flying.

Design and documentation.

The six brands in this group are construction, building and game names: Magformers, Geomag, Quercetti, K’NEX, CONNETIX and Nathan. Construction-toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to larger toy groups or are used under licence, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a specialist toy shop.

A construction-toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single piece than by a name, a box and a system of parts, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or licensed its mark to another maker. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its pieces are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its toys are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family firm that stays in Turin.

Quercetti remains a family business. Italian Wikipedia says the founder’s sons Andrea, Alberto and Stefano Quercetti continued his work and now lead the company, and Il Sole 24 Ore identified Stefano Quercetti as its chief executive in May 2021. The same Sole 24 Ore report placed the factory on the northern edge of Turin, in corso Vigevano, describing a grey reinforced-concrete industrial building from the 1970s with faded red details, near the remains of the former Fiat Grandi Motori works.

Where the toys are made is part of the company’s public stance. Il Sole 24 Ore reported that moving production to China or other lower-cost countries had never been considered inside the company, and quoted Stefano Quercetti saying that producing in Asia would mean longer lead times and less flexibility, and that the company would keep working in Italy. The paper also reported that Quercetti had set up a subsidiary in Maryland, in the United States, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, and that the Turin plant had stopped during the first lockdown before reopening in May 2020.

Its newer materials are visible on the shelf. Il Sole 24 Ore described the PlayBio range as made with a plastic containing plant-based content, recognisable by a pastel, matt finish rather than the gloss of the older toys, and Italian Wikipedia adds a PlayEco+ line made from recycled plastic. The same report noted that the mechanisms of its toys, including SkyRail, run without batteries, and that the catalogue includes a Montessori-inspired line.

For a design guide, Quercetti shows how a single, endlessly recombined component — a coloured peg in a perforated board — can carry a company’s name for decades — compare Geomag, another construction-toy brand with Italian roots, and HABA, the German family toymaker. For this guide we use peg red, yellow and blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Quercetti’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.