A plastics process before a toy brand.

Little Tikes grew out of a manufacturing method. In a 2017 profile in Plastics News, founder Tom Murdough explained what drew him to rotational moulding: the speed of getting started and the lower cost of building moulds and buying machines, which suited someone without much money. Rotational moulding spins a heated mould so that plastic coats the inside, producing large hollow shapes in one piece — the process behind the chunky, seamless look of the company’s ride-ons, slides and playhouses.

The same Plastics News account, written by Bill Bregar, says Murdough met Jack Hill at the Toy Fair in New York. Hill had just started a rotomoulding company called Rotadyne in a barn in Aurora, Ohio, and Murdough joined to build a line of children’s products. In 1970, the article says, Hill sold his share to Murdough, who went on to build the business into Little Tikes. The company’s own history page from 2009 likewise gives 1970 as its founding year. Plastics News traces the early moves: a leased plant in Solon, Ohio; a move to Macedonia, Ohio, in 1972; and a plant in California the following year. Murdough also recalled a 1970 trucking strike that threatened to derail a major order, and said he strengthened the executive team between 1978 and 1982, adding people to run finance, purchasing and manufacturing.

Ownership changed in the 1980s. Plastics News and the Akron Beacon Journal both report that Murdough sold Little Tikes to Rubbermaid in 1984, and the Beacon Journal says he stayed on through 1989. He later founded a rival rotomoulding toy company, Step2, which the Beacon Journal places in Streetsboro, the town next to Hudson.

Plastics News adds detail on that split. It reports that Murdough left Little Tikes five years after the Rubbermaid sale, following disagreements with Rubbermaid’s management over how the toy business should be run, and that once his non-compete period had ended he started Step2 in Twinsburg, Ohio, before it moved to a new plant in Streetsboro. In 2016, according to both papers, he founded a third rotomoulding company, Simplay3, also in Streetsboro. The result is a small cluster of moulded-plastic toy makers in north-east Ohio that traces back to one founder and one process.

A car with a roof, and a sandbox with a shell.

Two products from the same year define the brand’s look. Murdough told Plastics News that the Cozy Coupe and the Turtle Sandbox both came out in 1979. The Cozy Coupe, the article says, was designed by Cincinnati designer Jim Mariol. Murdough described the thinking behind it in simple terms: children love to climb into boxes and into anything with a roof on it, so the company talked about making a car that had a roof.

The company’s 2009 history page calls the Cozy Coupe “red and yellow” and marked its 25th anniversary in 2004, and that red-and-yellow pairing is the colour combination the company itself attaches to its signature car. Plastics News ran a photograph of the Cozy Coupe credited to the Little Tikes Co. alongside Murdough’s account of how it came about.

The same 2009 page lists the categories the company worked in by then, including ride-on toys, sandboxes, activity gyms and climbers, slides, sports toys, role-play toys and juvenile furniture.

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.

From Rubbermaid to MGA, still in Hudson.

The current owner arrived in 2006. The Associated Press reported on 11 September 2006 that Newell Rubbermaid, the Atlanta-based maker of Sharpie pens and Rubbermaid bins, was selling its Little Tikes children’s toys and furniture business to MGA Entertainment of Van Nuys, California, with the deal subject to regulatory approval and to consultation with employee groups in some European countries. The AP noted that Newell Rubbermaid had spent recent years restructuring, discontinuing or selling some of its operations, and that MGA made toys, dolls, games, consumer electronics and sporting goods. The company’s 2009 history page says Little Tikes became part of MGA Entertainment in November 2006, so MGA Entertainment has owned Little Tikes since 2006.

The brand stayed rooted in Ohio. The same 2009 page says Little Tikes’ headquarters and main manufacturing facility were in Hudson, Ohio, with further manufacturing and distribution centres in Europe and Asia. In June 2019 the Akron Beacon Journal reported on two days of events at the Hudson plant marking the company’s 50th anniversary, attended by Murdough and his family and by MGA chief executive Isaac Larian, who praised Murdough’s “creativity and boldness in creating Little Tikes”. The paper also described a Little Tikes museum at the site, where old company catalogues were posted on the walls. Murdough’s sons, it reported, had appeared in those catalogues as children and had been early product testers, and one of them recalled that plenty of good products never made it to market.

For a design guide, Little Tikes shows how a manufacturing process can become a visual identity: hollow, one-piece rotomoulded forms, rounded at every edge, and a red-and-yellow car that made the colours as recognisable as the name. Compare the founder’s later company in our Step2 brand guidelines and the wagon maker in our Radio Flyer brand guidelines. For this guide we use coupe red, roof yellow and sandbox green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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