Our Story

Tondo is Italian for round. The name arrived before the object did, which is an odd way to design something, but it turned out to be the entire brief: if a part of this thing could be round, it was going to be round.

The problem was six o'clock

Not screens in general — six o'clock in particular. The hour when dinner is not ready, patience has run out on both sides, and the easiest thing in the world is to hand over a tablet and buy twenty minutes.

It works. That is the trouble with it. It works so reliably that it stops being a decision and becomes a reflex, and then you are negotiating about the next episode every evening for a year.

We wanted something else to hand over. Not a lesson, not an educational app with a progress bar — just another object that could hold a small child's attention for twenty minutes and then stop, cleanly, without anyone having to be the villain who takes it away.

One gesture

Everything else followed from deciding there would be exactly one thing to learn. You put a disc on top and it plays. You lift it off and it stops.

There is no menu because a three-year-old cannot read one. There is no screen because a screen is the thing we were trying to avoid. There are no buttons because buttons need explaining, and anything that needs explaining belongs to the adult rather than the child.

A three-year-old works the whole thing out without being shown. That sounds like a small achievement. In practice it is most of the point: it is the difference between a toy they own and a device you operate for them.

Why it looks like a dish

The palette came from Sicilian ceramic and Moroccan zellige rather than from the toy aisle. Terracotta, olive, ochre, and a deep ink blue.

It is deliberately not the pale Scandinavian beige that every premium children's brand has settled on, and just as deliberately not the primary-coloured plastic of everything else. Those are both uniforms. We wanted something that looked like it had been chosen rather than tolerated — an object that behaves like a toy for the child and like a piece of pottery for the room.

That was the whole ambition. There was never a plan to add a screen later.

Who makes it

Tondo is made by ARPACA LLC, a small company registered in Wyoming. It is a short list of people, and if you write to us at hello@tondotoys.com one of them answers.