A plastics family, a handful of straws and a new company.

K’NEX came out of a Pennsylvania plastics business. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 52, 2003) says Joel Glickman worked for his family’s company, The Rodon Group, which had been founded in 1956. English Wikipedia describes Joel as the son of Rodon co-founder Irving Glickman and says K’NEX was created by Joel Glickman of The Rodon Group.

The idea is tied to a wedding. The Directory says Glickman, “apparently a shy man,” found himself at a wedding unwilling to mingle with the guests and passed the time playing with the plastic drinking straws at the buffet table. That, it says, gave him the thought of a construction set built from straw-like rods and connectors. Wikipedia tells the same story in brief, and adds that Glickman spent time perfecting the building system before the brand went on sale.

Getting it into shops took persistence. According to the Directory, Hasbro and Mattel were not interested at first, and Lego declined to look at the prototype. Support came from the retailer Toys “R” Us, which, the Directory says, test-marketed K’NEX in Philadelphia and Detroit in 1992. Wikipedia says the sets were on sale at Toys “R” Us from early October 1992 and that the chain’s head, Charles Lazarus, praised the system at the 1993 industry Toy Fair.

The business took a plain name at first. The Directory says it was incorporated in 1992 as the Connector Set Toy Company, and Wikipedia names today’s operating company as K’Nex Industries Inc. of Hatfield, Pennsylvania. The Directory recorded in 2003 that K’NEX was manufactured at a single plant in Hatfield, alongside the company’s offices there.

A rod, a connector and a click.

The system is simple to describe. The Directory says K’NEX building sets comprise rods of various sizes that snap into connectors. Wikipedia lists the basic parts as rods, connectors and bricks, joined by gears, wheels and other components, and says they can be assembled into models, machines and architectural structures.

Material is part of the design. The Directory says the toy was made from a proprietary brand of acetyl copolymer, which it calls a strong, flexible material, and Wikipedia says the basic pieces are made of polyoxymethylene plastic, the chemical name for that family of acetal plastics. A flexible rod that clicks into a slotted connector is the core of the toy’s look and feel.

Movement followed. Wikipedia says the original models with moving parts used a hand crank, and that gears and motors soon allowed models to move on their own. The same article describes Kid K’NEX, a bigger version of the system for younger builders, and a travelling exhibit, K’Nex: Build Thrill Rides, that has visited schools and museums across the US.

The brand has also carried other people’s characters. Wikipedia lists licensed K’NEX lines including Super Mario and Mario Kart (2011–2018), Angry Birds and Sesame Street, building sets that put the rod-and-connector system to work on familiar figures from games and television.

The brand reached screens of its own in 1998. Wikipedia lists two computer games released that year: K’NEX The Lost Mines: Adventure Begins, published by EAI Interactive for Windows 95, and Virtual K’Nex, released by Fox Interactive. Builders outside the toy industry have used the parts at a much larger scale; Wikipedia says the Engineering and Computer Science Association at Concordia University in Montreal has built K’NEX models of the Space Shuttle, the Sears Tower, the Eiffel Tower and Habitat 67.

Toys and design.

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 new owner in Florida, a factory that stayed in Pennsylvania.

The brand changed hands in 2018. The Toy Book reported on 12 February 2018 that Basic Fun!, a Florida toy company, had acquired the assets of K’NEX, which joined its Tech 4 Kids and Uncle Milton businesses. Basic Fun! has owned K’NEX since 2018. Basic Fun!’s chief executive, Jay Foreman, told the magazine the company was “very pleased to be adding this incredible iconic toy brand into our platform,” and K’NEX’s then chief executive, Michael Araten, said it was “time for us to connect this wonderful brand and its innovative product line with new owners.”

Production stayed close to home. The Toy Book said Basic Fun! would continue to make K’NEX rods and connectors in Pennsylvania under a long-term agreement with The Rodon Group, and would keep the K’NEX office and distribution centre in Hatfield running. The magazine also named Joel Glickman as one of the company’s founders, and said that Basic Fun! and K’NEX would each show their 2018 product lines at the North American International Toy Fair that month, in separate displays.

The owner has since been through a restructuring. Wikipedia says Basic Fun! filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2024, planning to keep operating while it repaid creditors, and emerged from the process on 1 November 2024.

For a design guide, K’NEX shows how a brand can be built on a single mechanical idea, a rod meeting a connector, and on a family manufacturer that still makes the parts. Compare Magna-Tiles, another American construction toy that began with one family, and Tegu, which builds with magnets in wooden blocks. For this guide we use connector red, rod yellow and blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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