Happy Little Doers

Where did the inspiration for Happy Little Doers come from?

March 2020 saw the arrival of the global pandemic and peoples lives were thrown into disarray. People could no longer commute to offices, shops became inaccessible, schools and nurseries shut down; it was the start of over a year living and working from home. In our home, we had our son Billy, who was 2.5 years at the time, and our daughter Lara, who was 1 year old. I was on furlough, supporting our family by looking after the kids.

During this time, my husband Ollie and I were concerned that our son was at particular risk, not being in a social environment or exposed to lots of opportunities to learn. The risk of exposing him to too much screen time was also a worry. So each day, like every parent, we tried to think about ways of helping to entertain our kids, especially when our daughter was napping.

On one of these occasions, we were playing a game with numbers. I wrote number digits on scraps of paper and dots on other pieces of paper. We played a game where Billy had to match the number of dots to the corresponding number. The following day, Billy turned around to me in the morning and said ‘Mummy, can we play that number game again?’. We continued to play with the scraps of paper so much that they became torn and crumpled very quickly and that was the lightbulb moment. From a simple game of numbers, our Number Flashcards was born and we started to sell them in July 2020 to other parents during the pandemic.

Is there a guiding mission that drives what you do?

Yes – our mission is to encourage kids to reach their full potential by helping them discover their favourite way of learning through play. Kids learn in four different ways – visual, audible, tactile and kinaesthetic. So our job is to help both parents and children work out what their favourite way is, by creating fun activities that can be used with our cards.

How would you like to see Happy Little Doers continue to grow in the future?

We’re incredibly fortunate with what we’ve achieved with Happy Little Doers so far. We’re still a young company and we still have lots of ideas. We have already expanded our range to include games, which we won two awards for during the last month and we plan to extend this range in the future.

We are so excited to be at Toy Fair, showing our full range to new retailers and building our brand awareness.