Two Wisconsin mothers turned a plastic sheet into a craft kit.

Shrinky Dinks began at a kitchen table rather than in a toy company’s design studio. English Wikipedia says the craft was created in 1973 by Betty Morris and Kate Bloomberg, two homemakers in Brookfield, Wisconsin, as a Cub Scout project with their sons. According to the same account, the first kits were sold at a local shopping mall, and the product found a following there before any national toy company was involved.

The idea rests on a property of the material. Wikipedia describes the base as thin, flexible polystyrene sheet — the plastic carrying recycling code 6 — which can be cut with ordinary household scissors. Before heating, the sheet is coloured with felt-tip pens, acrylic paint or coloured pencils and cut into shapes; once it is heated, the encyclopedia says, the piece shrinks to about one third of its original width and height while becoming about nine times thicker, ending up as a hard, flat form that keeps its colours and outline. Wikipedia notes that oily or waxy media such as crayons and oil paint are not suitable, because they melt or burn at the temperatures involved.

That transformation gives the brand its whole visual logic. A drawing goes into the oven large, pale and floppy, and comes out small, saturated and stiff; the colours that looked thin on the clear or frosted sheet concentrate as the plastic contracts. Wikipedia says the heating can be done in a conventional oven, an Easy-Bake Oven or with a heat gun, and that most sets are pre-printed with outline images — popular children’s characters and other subjects — to be coloured in before baking. The generic name for the craft, the encyclopedia says, is shrink art, and it is also sold under other names such as Shrinkles; Shrinky Dinks is the original trade name that the category grew around.

From a Wisconsin mall to the big toy companies, then to Alex and Just Play.

The brand did not stay a local venture for long. English Wikipedia says that Shrinky Dinks were soon licensed to be made by several of the major toy companies of the period, naming Milton Bradley, Colorforms, Western Publishing and Skyline Toys among them. That licensing model meant the name appeared on boxes from a succession of different makers over the years, each with its own packaging and character tie-ins, while the material and the oven-shrinking trick at the centre of the kit stayed the same.

Ownership of the name changed hands more recently. According to English Wikipedia, Alex Brands — the American arts-and-crafts and toy group — acquired Shrinky Dinks in 2014, and as of 2020 the original brand was owned by Just Play Products. The brand’s own web address, shrinkydinks.com, now opens on the Just Play Products website, which carries a notice naming Just Play, LLC (checked on 13 October 2026).

Shrinky Dinks has also travelled well beyond the toy aisle. Wikipedia says adult crafters use the sheets for jewellery and other projects, and that blank sheets are sold in bulk for that purpose; typical uses it lists include charms, pins and zip pulls. In 2008, according to the same article, Michelle Khine, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, used Shrinky Dinks to make tiny structures for microfluidics research, later work by her group looking at microscale diagnostics and wearable sensors; and in 2014 a team from Harvard University and MIT used the material to build self-folding robots. Those laboratory uses rely on exactly the property that makes the craft work at home: a printed pattern that shrinks predictably and keeps its shape.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are classic toy names: drawing boards, building sets, craft kits and construction toys that many families have known across more than one generation. Toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names still run by the company that started them to labels that have passed through several owners, and to marks that are licensed out to other manufacturers for years at a time.

A toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by any single product than by a name, a logo, a box and a handful of colours, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or licensed the mark to someone else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, who makes the toy today and where it is made.

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

A material trick that became a brand.

What makes Shrinky Dinks distinctive as a brand is that the product is a process. The name itself describes what happens in the oven, and the kit is less a finished object than a promise of transformation: a large, faint drawing on clear plastic that turns into a small, bright, rigid piece. English Wikipedia says the craft reached its peak of popularity in the 1980s and is still available from retailers, and the brand has carried that before-and-after idea through decades of licensed boxes and owners — from the Brookfield originators to Alex Brands in 2014 and Just Play Products by 2020.

For designers, the useful lesson is how much identity a single, memorable mechanism can carry. The colours are whatever the user draws; the shapes are whatever the user cuts; what stays constant is the name, the material and the moment the piece curls, flattens and settles in the oven. A brand built that way needs a playful, rounded voice and a palette loud enough to read at a third of the size. It also has to survive many hands: the licensed boxes made by Milton Bradley, Colorforms and others each dressed the same idea differently.

For a design guide, Shrinky Dinks shows how a craft brand can be held together by one physical trick rather than one product — compare the wax-and-paper story of Crayola and the screen-and-stylus drawing board of Magna Doodle. For this guide we use shrink magenta, sheet teal and marker yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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