PlayPower Brand Guidelines: The Huntersville Group Behind Miracle, Playworld and HAGS

A parent company with other names on the slide.

PlayPower is a group more than a single maker. Its website calls it “a family of brands,” each a wholly owned subsidiary, and a 2015 press release from a later owner said it sold its commercial playground equipment under brand names such as Miracle Recreation Equipment, Little Tikes Commercial, Hags Play and Soft Play. The group is based in Huntersville, North Carolina, and since October 2025 it has belonged to the Los Angeles private equity firm Platinum Equity.

Its longest history belongs to Miracle. English Wikipedia says John Ahrens founded the business in Grinnell, Iowa, in 1927 as Ahrens Manufacturing Company, after redesigning the merry-go-round into a patented product he called the Miracle Whirl. His son Claude took over in 1940 and, Wikipedia says, renamed the firm Miracle Recreation Equipment Company in 1947. An undated trade profile in Playground Professionals gives a slightly different account: 1927 as the year the Miracle Whirl was patented, 1949 as the year Miracle became a company, as a division of Ahrens, and 1970 as the year it merged with Jamison, Inc. of Los Angeles. The two accounts agree on the 1927 starting point.

Wikipedia’s account of the following decades is one of steady widening. Country schools were almost all of the first customers. Swings, teeter-totters and jungle gyms followed, along with fibreglass bleachers for university stadiums and, through Claude’s son Paul Ahrens, playgrounds for McDonald’s restaurants, more than 500 of them. The same article credits Miracle with pioneering fibreglass slides and canopies and with being the first playground maker to powder-coat steel parts, in the late 1960s. After labour disputes in Iowa, it says, plans for a plant in Monett, Missouri, were announced in 1982, and the decision to move all operations there came in 1986. Wikipedia dates the sale of Miracle to PlayPower to 2002. PlayPower’s brand page still lists Monett as the home of both Miracle and Little Tikes Commercial.

Three owners in a decade, and more brands.

The group’s recent history is well documented, because investors announced it. On 18 May 2015 Littlejohn & Co., a private investment firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, said it had signed an agreement to buy PlayPower Holdings from Apollo Investment Corporation, with completion expected that quarter; Landscape Architect and Specifier News reported the deal two days later. By then the portfolio also included USA SHADE & Fabric Structures, for modular shade structures, and EZ Dock, for floating docks and lifts. The chief executive, Joe Copeland, said in the release that Littlejohn wanted to see the group complete more acquisitions.

It did. In 2016 PlayPower bought Playworld, the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, playground maker, according to Lincoln International, the bank that advised on the sale. Playworld’s chief executive became president of North America Play at PlayPower.

On 15 September 2025 Platinum Equity announced an agreement to buy PlayPower from Littlejohn, and the firm later said the purchase was completed; SGB Media reported it on 31 October 2025. Platinum’s managing director, Nathan Eldridge, said the firm wanted to grow the company organically and through new acquisitions. In February 2026 PlayPower announced an agreement to buy BCI Burke, the playground maker based in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a deal then expected to complete in the second quarter of 2026.

PlayPower’s website lists twelve brands, and they reach well past the playground. Miracle, Playworld, Little Tikes Commercial and HAGS of Aneby, Sweden, make up the outdoor play side, with HAGS described by PlayPower as Europe’s largest creator of outdoor spaces for play, sports and fitness. Soft Play builds indoor structures, Playtime of Colorado makes themed environments, and Tayplay of Perth, Scotland, makes rope and net climbers. Beyond play, No Fault of Baton Rouge lays poured-in-place rubber surfacing, VPS builds covered parking, and Wabash Valley makes site furnishings.

Design and documentation.

Playground equipment is sold to people who will never climb on it: parks departments, school boards, housing associations and landscape architects. The makers’ brochures speak to those buyers. Their catalogues tend to lead with an installed site rather than a single object, often a town square, a schoolyard or a housing estate with the equipment in use and the setting in view.

The visual language comes largely from the materials. Steel frames and posts arrive powder-coated in strong primary colours, set against panels in black, sand or a muted green. Timber ranges, in species such as robinia and larch, read differently: greyer and more irregular, closer to the trees around them. Rope nets add a third texture, and rubber surfacing, poured or laid beneath the equipment, adds a field of colour that can run across a whole site.

Geography is part of the presentation too. Several makers come from small towns rather than capitals, and a Nordic catalogue image can be a park in a modest town under low light, with the equipment as the brightest thing in view. Others present a works, a family name or a date on a timeline.

Installers are part of the product too: this equipment reaches its users only after a crew has dug footings, fixed posts and laid the surface. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now, where it says its products are made, and which of those statements rest on the company’s word alone.

“Families that play together stay together.”

PlayPower says it is “a fully integrated manufacturer of commercial recreational and leisure products,” and it names its plants: Monett, Missouri; Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Dallas, Texas; Silver Lake, Indiana; Nogales, Mexico; and Sosnowiec, Poland. It gives more than a million square feet of manufacturing space in the United States, 65,000 in Mexico and 290,000 in Europe, covering rotational moulding, metal fabrication, woodworking, fibreglass moulding and rope work. Those figures are the company’s own. A September 2021 release from the company called it “the world’s largest commercial playground and recreational equipment manufacturer”; Platinum Equity’s 2025 wording was “one of the world’s leading designers and manufacturers.”

The company’s other claims lean towards new categories and materials. In September 2021 it introduced PlaySoleil, solar-powered lighting for playgrounds, and that November it launched PlayPower Tech, a venture using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine in physical play spaces, with the attractions veterans Denise Chapman Weston and Rick Briggs. In March 2022 it said it was a founding member of the Business Council of the National Recreation and Park Association. Its 2025 sustainability report, it says, records 14 million pounds of rubber tyres recycled.

Its brands appear in the public record of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSC announced a Miracle recall of tyre swings in June 2008. Playworld recalled about 1,300 stainless steel slides, made by Horizon Industries, in December 2016, after 13 reports of broken welds, including two finger amputations. Soft Play recalled Sky Wheels in July 2023 over a fall hazard. In May 2025 Playworld recalled about 329 Unity Teeter Tunnels after two reports of children injured beneath the seesaw plank.

The house identity sits behind all of this. The website’s line is “Families that play together stay together,” its stated belief is in “the power of play,” and each product brand keeps its own name, site and address. One name needs care: Little Tikes, the toy business, was bought by MGA Entertainment in 2006, English Wikipedia says, and PlayPower’s footer states that it uses the trademark under licence for Little Tikes Commercial.

For a design guide, PlayPower shows how a parent company can stay in the background while older names do the public work. Compare Playworld, one of its American brands, and HAGS, its Swedish one. For this guide we use a deep teal, a slide orange and a rope cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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