The Beauty of Imperfection

As more people become aware of the individual impact they are having on the environment, we see that more people are willing to invest in sustainable resources. The shift from plastic to a more natural choice is evident also in the toy and educational market. Sometimes we carry a mindset of perfection into the marketplace of natural toys. Is it any wonder? The perfect moulds of shiny plastic without blemish have conditioned us for many years. We live in a society that throws away food because of natural markings and needs a section in supermarkets for ‘odd shaped fruit’. This mindset then spills over into the toy market where consumers’ expectations of natural toys are that they should have no markings or the same perfection as plastic. This is simply unrealistic.

Thankfully there now are a few wooden toy designers that have led the way in changing this mindset, where their beautiful wooden toys still have the natural wooden grains and the odd wood knot. It is not unusual for a wooden toys to have these imperfections. Wood knots are simply the result of trees having branches! The tree branches drop off healthy, living trees and wood knots appear where branches were. These imperfections are just part of what make natural wooden toys beautiful resources. Our Wooden Water Ways resource definitely have this validation of quality with natural wood grains and knots present.

For us at Explore Nook we love the uniqueness of bamboo. Each piece has a unique character. It proves it is natural bamboo. We have seen companies actually make fabricated bamboo and then sell it as bamboo blocks! What a shame.

This is the reason we decided to use 100% real bamboo with its imperfections to make our bamboo resources! For example, our Bamboo Construct & Roll bamboo pieces may have stress marks or natural cracks.

These cracks are to be expected when using a natural resource such as bamboo and will not affect how the resource is played with.  All pieces have varying shape based on how it naturally grew and therefore many pieces are not perfectly round. Each piece has a character of its own and each set is in someway unique, with varying shades of colour and shape.

Bamboo comes in various shades and has unique ‘made by nature’ markings. Sometimes there are stress marks in bamboo appearing as hairline fractures along the poles. These do not affect the way the toy is played with and we do not consider them a defect but a proof of quality.