Not a team to be caught asleep at the wheel, PlayPress Toys has continued its pursuit of reduced impact by delivering its first packaging-free play-set.

Called Savannah Animals, the new range follows the traditional PlayPress Toys play pattern that has made it a popular choice among environmentally-conscious customers, enhancing the pop-out element to enable the team to do away with all excess packaging.

Now, children and parents can pop out and assemble the animal shape toys before returning them to their positions – transforming their cardboard encasing into an in-built storage system.

“Our goal has always been to use less materials, so we have taken customer feedback and tried out a bunch of ideas,” said Matthew Wright, product designer at the family-owned PlayPress Toys.

“We found that kids loved to put pieces back in the off-cut sheets and that parents were then using them as travel toys. We always wanted packaging that could act as a box to store the pieces and we found that the answer was there the whole time – the sheets the pieces come with.”

With a tweak to the design of the packaging, the adapted housing now allows children to relocate the parts for packing away.

“It gives the toy a whole other dimension, too,” said Melvin Wright, managing director at PlayPress Toys. “Much like completing a jigsaw.”

The Savannah Animals collection marks the first to be produced packaging-free but the plan is to continue to roll out adaptations across the product portfolio at PlayPress Toys. The team has already made similar tweaks to some of the new RSPB-licensed sets landing on shelves later this year.

The designer behind the majority of PlayPress’ popular range, including its award-winning licensed portfolio that includes The Gruffalo, Zog, the RNLI, and plenty more, Matthew has found that designing around constrictions such as material use and eliminating waste has only enhanced the creative process of product design.

“If you say, it has to be this size or this material or just one colour etc, this can focus you to come up with creative solutions to fit those parameters and you can end up with some really interesting things – results you could never have imagined at the start or have ever reached had you started without the restrictions,” said Matthew.

“So, starting with the idea that we wanted to use less material, in both amount and type, helped lead us to this design.”

For the future, PlayPress has a plethora of ‘ideas and things’ that the team is “already really looking forward to working on.”

“We have a whole bunch of products in the pipeline. We’ll just keep experimenting and trying things out. We just love to design and make and who knows where that will lead?”