A trading house that turned to wooden toys.

small foot began as a different kind of business. The company’s own history page says the brothers Holger and Ingo Legler founded the trading firm Legler OHG in 1988, and that its early focus was importing and selling promotional and gift products made of wood. A July 2020 interview on the German sustainability site LifeVERDE, with managing director André Eichinger, gives the same year and the same two founders, and describes Legler as a wholesale business in northern Germany that concentrated more and more on wooden toys over the years.

The company’s timeline puts its headquarters in Delmenhorst, in Lower Saxony, from 1995. In a July 2023 announcement, Spielwarenmesse eG, the cooperative behind the Nuremberg toy fair, said Legler had taken part in the Spielwarenmesse ever since its first appearance there in 1995, and welcomed the “Legler OHG small foot company” as a new member.

The company says the Delmenhorst operation grew in stages: a collection point and showroom in 2004, a further warehouse building in 2005, an Italian subsidiary, Legler Italia, in 2012, and an American subsidiary, Legler USA, in 2019. It says that from 1 August 2026 its administration moved to new offices at Airport City Bremen, while logistics were brought together in a high-bay warehouse in Bassum.

A child’s footprint, then a single name.

The brand’s mark has a family story attached to it. The company’s timeline says the small foot brand was born in 2002, and that “the foot in the logo comes from the real footprint of a Legler child.” The 2020 LifeVERDE interview is more specific: it says the footprint belonged to Ingo Legler’s daughter, born in 2002, and that it became both the logo of the small foot brand and a symbol for its wooden toys. The name and the mark therefore say the same thing twice — a small foot, drawn from a real one.

For most of its history the business ran two names side by side, a trade name, Legler, and a product brand, small foot. The company says the two were merged at the start of 2023, when Legler was turned into small foot, and that in 2024 the “Legler OHG small foot company” was converted into small foot GmbH & Co. KG. The brand written in lower case, with its footprint, now carries the company as well as the products.

The company explained the change in a release ahead of the 2023 Spielwarenmesse. It said the side-by-side use of the trade name Legler and the product brand small foot had confused customers and business partners, that wooden toys had become the core of the business, and that a single, clearer brand would bring more reach and visibility. Pascal Adam, named in the release as managing director of Legler OHG small foot, said that “business as usual” can lead to stagnation and regression, and that the 2023 fair would mark the birth of a new direction in brand communication for small foot. The release promised a new look and feel to go with the single name, presented to the trade at Nuremberg.

The catalogue has also been shaped by licensed characters. The company says The Very Hungry Caterpillar became a licence in 2015 for activity toys, rocking animals and soft toys, that products featuring “The Mouse” joined the wooden range in 2016, that Sesame Street was added in 2017, and that Animal Planet figures expanded its farm and play-world sets in 2018. Those borrowed characters sit alongside the company’s own designs, which Eichinger told LifeVERDE are developed in-house in northern Germany, taking classic play ideas and reworking them in design and product.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all toy names: small foot, Bajo, Moluk, Magna-Tiles, Kaloo, Guidecraft and Lilliputiens. Toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family workshops that still carry a founder’s idea to labels that now belong to larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a small independent shop to a department store or an online marketplace.

A toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single object than by a box, a name, a colour and a way of drawing, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its toys are actually designed and 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 boxes and logos have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Wood, plastic-free aims and a northern base.

On materials, small foot describes its approach in general terms. In the 2020 LifeVERDE interview, Eichinger said the company relies on plastic-free solutions where it can, uses FSC-certified wood, keeps outer packaging as small as possible to save transport space, and avoids films and plastics where possible. He added that packaging waste is avoided in the first place, and that recyclable materials are separated and sent for recycling. He described the range as aimed at children up to the age of six, and named products such as the “Move it!” stacking tower and a whale-shaped walker.

The business remains rooted in the Bremen area. The company’s own timeline traces it from Delmenhorst to its 2026 offices at Airport City Bremen and its Bassum warehouse, and the Spielwarenmesse announcement of 2023 identified it as a Delmenhorst company. Its long association with Nuremberg, as an exhibitor at the toy fair since 1995 and a member of the fair cooperative since 2023, is one of the few constants across its name changes.

For a design guide, small foot shows how a single personal detail — a child’s footprint — can carry a whole wooden-toy brand through a change of name and legal form — compare goki, another northern German wooden-toy brand, and HABA, the German family toymaker. For this guide we use meadow green, honey and brick red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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