A kite brand run from an old farmstead.

HQ is not a company of its own but a brand. It belongs to Invento Products & Services GmbH, a toy and kite business based in Rastede, in Lower Saxony, a few kilometres north of the city of Oldenburg. In a feature published on 27 August 2026, the Bremen newspaper Weser-Kurier described the company’s home as a former farmstead in an industrial area near the Oldenburg-Nord motorway junction, a patch of trees among factory halls and car parks that staff like to call the site’s “green lung”.

The company’s own pages explain the name. Invento says its kites and wind toys are sold worldwide under its umbrella brand “HQ”, and that the two letters stand for “High Quality Design”. The same pages list the people who run the business: Heinz Hoffmeier, Hans Pinkenburg and Tim Baxmeyer, each named as an owner and managing director, and the company’s legal notice names the same three as its managing directors. The Weser-Kurier likewise described Baxmeyer as one of three owners and managing directors.

Invento has had a web presence for some time. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine holds a capture of the invento-hq.com address from November 1998, and today both hq-kites.com and hqkites.com lead to the same Invento site rather than to a separate HQ company. On its partnership page the company also says it works with NABU, the German nature-conservation association, to provide nesting boxes for birds, bats and insects on its grounds, which it describes as a former farm in the Ammerland district adapted for a modern business, looked after by NABU volunteers.

Stunt kites, children’s kites and wind spinners.

The HQ range covers more than one kind of kite. Invento’s catalogue is divided into stunt kites, single-line kites, HQ4 power kites and wind toys, alongside separate sections for toys and outdoor games. The Weser-Kurier visit found models of butterflies, wind spinners and lanterns hanging and standing in the development workshop, and reported that the company does not make the giant show kites seen at festivals, which the paper described as a niche within a niche and unsuited to series production.

Among the models the paper singled out was the Symphony Beach, which Baxmeyer unpacked from stock during the visit. The newspaper described it as a kite with a control bar and two lines, a polyester canopy, and a shape familiar from kitesurfing kites, and said buyers of the Symphony Beach line are mainly newcomers. The developer behind such models, the paper reported, looks for a round flight pattern, simple handling and solid equipment when designing a new kite.

Children’s kites are the other end of the range. In an August 2026 press release, Invento announced new HQ children’s kites with capybara and axolotl motifs, built on two existing children’s-kite platforms it calls Eddy and Simple Flyer. The company said the kites are supplied ready to fly, with line and either a handle or a spool. The release presents the motifs as current trend animals set on established kite shapes.

Design work happens in Rastede. The Weser-Kurier described product developer Alex Hesse at work in a colourful workshop under the roof of the old farmhouse, equipped with sewing machines and fabrics, blades, compasses and saws, tape and a bench drill. Hesse told the paper that flying kites is a piece of culture: getting outside into fresh air, moving, spending time with friends or family and learning a skill. The only real limit on his ideas, the paper wrote, is that a new model has to sell.

Design and documentation.

Outdoor play and ride-on toys sit in a part of the toy trade where the product is meant to leave the house: things that are thrown, flown, launched, pushed, pedalled or ridden in gardens, parks, driveways and beaches. Many of the names in this field began with a single object and built a brand around it, while others grew into wider ranges of moulded, sewn or wooden goods sold through toy shops, garden centres and general retailers.

Because these toys are used outdoors and seen from a distance, their identities tend to lean on bright, saturated colour and simple, bold names that read on a box, a deck or a canopy. Behind the names, ownership can change over time, and design, sales and manufacturing are often in different places, so the country on the box and the country of production may not be the same.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started it, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its look has developed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed in Rastede, made in Asia.

On manufacturing, the 2026 Weser-Kurier feature is specific. It reported that Invento moved its kite production abroad, first to Poland and today to Asia, while the Rastede site handles logistics, sales and development. The same article reported that the business also has a United States subsidiary, HQ Kites & Design, in North Carolina; Invento’s own team page places that subsidiary in Powells Point. The paper also noted that Invento has broadened beyond kites into toy distribution, and the company says it acts as a distribution partner for other toy brands in Germany, Austria and some further markets. Its brand list includes Wham-O and Stomp Rocket. Its own toy lines now sit under a second umbrella name, Invento Just Play, the company says.

The brand meets its customers in the open air. The Weser-Kurier reported that Invento staff run an HQ Flight School at kite festivals, including the Drachen über Lemwerder festival on the Weser, giving introductions to kite flying while picking up first-hand what fliers want. The company’s site lists the Flight School and a calendar of kite festivals alongside its catalogues.

Colour is a running conversation inside the company. Baxmeyer told the paper that the team regularly discusses whether its kites could be a little more muted, given that staff work every day with neon blue, bright red and bright yellow. Just as regularly, he said, fans and customers give the same answer: for them, a kite can hardly be colourful enough.

For a design guide, HQ Kites shows how a brand can live on saturated colour against an open sky, with the name doing the work of a promise rather than a place. Compare the Swedish toy name in our BRIO brand guidelines and the design-led toy maker in our Hape brand guidelines. For this guide we use sky blue, kite red and signal yellow with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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