Project: British Toy Making Project

Mr Robert Longstaff Robert Longstaff Workshops

Interview conducted by Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood

August 2011

Transcribed by Kerry Cable August 2012

Edited by

Robert Longstaff and Laura Wood August 2013

Copyright © 2011 Museum of Childhood

Robert Longstaff

FULL NAME: Robert Longstaff

INTERVIEWER: Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood

DATE: 23 August 2011

PLACE: Robert Longstaff Workshops, Longworth, Oxfordshire

TYPE OF EQUIP: PMD Marantz 661, Wav, 48Hz, 16 bit

LENGTH OF INTERVIEW: 56 minutes, 20 seconds

CAREER BACKGROUND

Robert Longstaff spent ten years working as a research biologist. He began to make

musical instruments as a hobby in 1973 and was invited by the director of South Hill

Park Arts Centre in Bracknell to be their instrument maker in residence. He spent five

years there and taught a course on stringed and percussion instruments. He started

making wooden puzzles and toys using off cuts of wood. Longstaff used to have

exhibitions of his instruments put on in Heal's Guildford store and when a Heal's

member of staff visited the workshop they saw the toys and suggested they also be

included in the exhibition.

The toys sold well and Heal's soon placed an order for more, quickly followed by

Hamleys, Galt and Boots. Robert Longstaff Workshops quickly expanded and their

achievements included pioneering the technique of laser cutting in jigsaw design.

INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS

Robert Longstaff discusses how he became involved in the toy manufacturing

industry; laser cutting in jigsaw design; the use of toys as learning and developmental

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aids; the services Robert Longstaff Workshops offer including replacing missing puzzle

pieces; the running of Robert Longstaff Workshops, and their relationship with

retailers.

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We’re recording now. So you can start with ---. <0:00:03>

Okay. Certainly. I’m Robert Longstaff and with my wife Yvonne we’ve run a

partnership making wooden toys amongst other things for the last 35 years.

We specialise in laser cutting now but generally wooden toys and traditional

wooden toys, puzzles, educational equipment and special needs.

And how did you start? <0:00:31>

Totally by accident. I spent the first ten years of my career being a research

biologist looking at the effects of farming and pesticides on wildlife so I am a

committed green person for what of a better word. I used to make early

musical instruments as a hobby and that turned into a business when I was

invited by the director at South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell if I would like

to be instrument maker in residence at the art centre. And I spent five years

there making musical instruments and teaching the first ever course for early

stringed and percussion instruments and it was great fun. But we used to use a

lot of very exotic timbers for that and being a green person I hated wasting

them so we made smaller things from the bits that were left. We’ve always

been puzzle people so we started making wooden puzzles and miniature

wooden instruments and other bits and pieces and that transpired to toys. The

accident really happened, we used to go to Heals in Guildford and London and

do exhibitions for them of the instruments. And we’d just spent a week or two

making wooden toys for friends’ offspring, relatives, for Christmas and they

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were sitting around the workshop when the gentleman came to book us for the

next talk. And said, ‘Oh, these look like fun, why don’t you bring some along?’

So we spent another week making some, took them along. Much to his horror

they sold and they then actually placed an order. And in our naivety at that

time we just pyrographed our phone number and name on the bottom of them

all and within a week after that we were hit by Hamleys and Galt shops and

Boots and you name it, saying could they see our catalogue please. At which

point we thought okay, we’re toymakers. And it was as simple and strange as

that.

And in terms of you said you were a scientist before, how has this scientific

background influenced your products and the way the company’s developed?

<0:02:41>

Certainly we do it differently to most other people, as I’m sure you’ve noticed in

your wander around. I consider myself incredibly lucky. I have a form of

dyslexia which means basically if I see anything, do anything or read about

anything, I never forget it. I’m also one of those rare males who can actually

read a manual and understand it. So I can pick up something that I’ve never

known about before or a piece of equipment and read what it does and

understand it. And basically I’ve been classified as a classic left/right split in

brain usage. So I have an artistic side and a design side which is fairly unique

because it has access to a clinical scientific side at the same time. So effectively

I can sit and have a think to myself and have a multi board meeting

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brainstorming session just within my own head, which is probably why it makes

me quite as strange as I am, but it does mean things get done rather quicker

than perhaps other people do. And literally just can look at something or a

drawing or we have a conversation and I have a 3D image of that in my head

straightaway, so I know what I’m aiming for almost instantly which is why we

turn things around so quickly. You know, we deal with larger companies that

expect six or nine monthly development time, I have it ready in a couple of days

because I know exactly what I’m trying to get to and I know how to get there.

So it’s a bit different. So the toys we’ve designed have always been that little

bit different, even our traditional range of cars and wheeled toys and pull along

animals always had something unique and different to them. I’m fairly happy

to say that I see my designs copied time and time again now almost as if they’re

traditional and that’s the way it’s always been done, because they had

something that made them stand apart from the basic models, which is great

fun.

Can you sort of talk through some of the, for example the puzzles, what makes them

special compared to other puzzles [inaudible 0:05:01]? <0:05:01>

I mean at the moment that’s obviously the laser technique that we’re using.

And effectively we started hand cutting puzzles like everybody else does and I

think it was back in the early ‘80s that we took on a huge batch of supposedly

difficult customers to work with in that they are very demanding of a product

to be correct. And I think at that time we had 19 people cutting here and 14

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outworkers. And we got to the end of that year having dealt with customers

such as Boots and Mothercare and Marks & Spencer's to name a few, and

basically sat back at the end of it and thought we’re running a sweatshop.

We’re ankle deep in sawdust, you know, this isn’t quite what we started the

business to be doing. And you then look at the choices. So we talked to other

people in the industry and the choices always seems to be to go overseas

somewhere and exploit somebody else, which isn’t quite our way as you

would’ve gathered. The business has always been run as a social enterprise

even though it is owned by Yvonne and myself. It’s been run along a social

enterprise and co-operative basis the whole time, which is important to us.

May be strange in this day and age, although it’s coming back into its own now.

So we've always gone that route. So that didn’t seem the right option. So we

thought well what other option do we have on jigsaw puzzle making? We carry

on what we’re doing, we either run a sweatshop for ourselves, we run a

sweatshop for somebody else or we look to drag puzzles maybe into the 19th

century if not the 20th as it was then because we’re still effectively cutting them

the same way they were cut in the 17th century. So we looked into other

methods and my scientific background helped in that, but also my number two

here Philip Kenrick, who is a professor of archaeology and also has maths and

physics as a second, and between us we were a fairly formidable team. And we

managed to get a small grant from the DTI to look into other ways of cutting

and we started looking at diamond wires in the first instance, which was fairly

successful. We then went on to water jet cutting and then enhanced slurry

water jet cutting which was pretty good. I mean we started this with the

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premise that we needed to be able to cut a circle, a triangle and a square from a

piece of wood. They could then be rotated in the holes that they came out of so

they’re a perfect fit either way round. We then needed to cut a second one and

interchange the pieces and they still needed to rotate. Once we can do that we

can do absolutely anything.

So this was a test of the technology? <0:07:50>

Absolutely, because it’s something almost impossible to do by hand. You ask

anybody, even a skilled cutter and there are still some skilled cutters around, to

cut a square. They can cut a square. But to cut one that then can turn 90

degrees and fit back in that hole, very, very rare. And to be able to do that on

the next puzzle in the batch, almost impossible. So you have a constraint. We

helped George Luck at one stage when he’s gone into laser cutting in the same

way. But previously all the beautiful puzzles that George Luck made which

were all individually cut and hand coloured, the multilayered animal ones that

you’ve seen, but the dolphin from puzzle one had to go back into puzzle one it

couldn’t go back into puzzle two. So the manufacturing problems were

immense. We thought if we can get over that basically the world is our oyster.

We know we are unfettered then in anything we need not to do in the project.

The waterjet cutting did that but the difficulty with the waterjet cutting you’re

still putting your physical medium through the material. So whether you’re

using a saw which goes up and down and puts splinters on the back of the

puzzle, the water jet did the same, it put splinters, finer splinters but they’re

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still there. And you also had a problem that because you’re putting the water

through you get a Venturi effect behind it, so you get a slight dampening to the

wood and if you then put that straight into the packaging it can go mouldy. So

you have to then dry them as well so you have another process to put into it.

And we were doing some work with a university about the water jet cutting

and we just happened to go and visit them to do something or other else and

they showed us around their laser department. And we said, ‘Great, can’t we do

this with lasers?’ They said, ‘Oh no, no, no, you can’t cut wood with lasers.’ ‘Do

you mind if we have a look?’ So we put our little water jet programme onto the

laser and we put the piece of wood on, and when the smoke cleared we picked

up this sort of charcoal and thought okay, can’t cut puzzles with a laser, it’s a

simple as that. And we came home quite disappointed with that. And that

weekend we just happened to have some friends down and we were talking

about this over dinner and he said, ‘Well that’s interesting, our son’s doing

optical welding with lasers.’ I said, ‘I thought he was a doctor, I didn’t know he’s

gone into engineering?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, he’s reattaching detached retinas

using laser beams.’ At which point I thought hang on, this guy’s shooting lasers

through living people’s heads and they are presumably standing up again after,

and we’re making charcoal, what’s going on here? And I started reading up

everything I could about lasers. I’m afraid it does get awfully [inaudible 0:10:28]

at this stage, because up until then whether it was Star Wars or your firework

concert, a laser is a laser is a laser. And that’s by far from true. So I started

understanding the physics of lasers and it thought I felt that we’d found an

overlap between the industrial lasers which produce carbon and the medical

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lasers which would not have cut wood but cut cleanly and delicately. So it was

a choice between selling a few of the children or my TR4A that I’d just finished

restoring, and unfortunately the children stayed. So we did that to go and

borrow a laser from the university. It was all we could do to hire one for a day

and it cost that much money to hire for a day. We went to local companies

including Oxford Scientific which make bits for medical lasers. We borrowed

bits. Another good friend of mine, Paul Taylor, help us to write and bug the

software so it was not readable by anybody else, because, you know, we had no

idea what we were doing to be perfectly honest, but it was great fun. And we

went in at 9 o'clock and we asked them if they’d leave us and could we lock the

door please because we didn’t want them to see we’re just about to take their

half million pound laser apart and bolt a few extra bits on, which we did. And

sort of at 10.30am we’d sat down with a cup of coffee and the first ever laser cut

puzzle, which just worked. And it’s a little cruder than what we make now but

not very much so, but it is still better than any of the competition worldwide on

the market. So we played a bit for the day as we thought we might as well,

we’ve paid for all this let’s keep doing some. And really at that point it was a

matter of we have to sit down and digest what the heck’s happened here

because nobody else had – a lot of other people have tried and everyone said it

couldn’t be done. So we came back and we went back to the DTI and said,

‘We’ve done this, can we have a little bit more money to do some more please?

We think this is important.’ And effectively all the grants had been given up at

that time, that was the last Lottery sessions in the ‘80s, ours were long before

that. And they had one small pot of money available for joint venture. So we

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went off to Culham which is not very far away from here, to the Joint European

Application Research Centre, and showed them what we doing and said, ‘We’ve

done this, would you like to work with us, we think we can do more with this?’

At which point they said, ‘Yes, love to do a joint venture on this, we’re going to

learn a lot from you.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, we’ve done this, we want to know

where to go from here, we’ve never seen work like this in an actual material

before.’ So we came back and looked at the small print and the small print said

whatever we did we would have to publish. And I thought well do we really

want to tell everybody what we’re doing? If nobody else is doing this, probably

not. So we were lucky at that stage because it was just when the banks were

starting to lend money again and we trotted along to the bank and said, ‘This is

what we’ve done, we’d like some money please because we can’t afford to buy

a laser ‘cause we can’t afford half a million, but we’d like to build one.’ And

they asked no questions, apart from how much. And we said, ‘Oh about

£100,000.’ So we walked out with a £100,000 overdraft which we spent

£85,000 of the next morning. Bought a pile of secondhand bits and a manual

and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to build a laser.’ And within about three months

we had. And we started working with another company because it had to go

through health and safety. So they basically got it signed off for us and we took

that back in-house. And that would be back in 1985.

How many people were working on the development of the laser here with you?

<0:14:26>

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With us? Basically it was Philip and myself and we just were having a whale of

a time.

And how long did it take you? <0:14:32>

I suppose start to finish it was about six months from saying we really, really

want to do this, we’ve got to find the money somehow, to having a machine

that worked. So that was coming up to Christmas and we announced that we

would take laser cut puzzles to the Toy Fairs in ’86, which created a lot people

falling about laughing because Fisher Price had just announced in the press that

they’d spent $500,000 researching laser cutting of puzzles and said it couldn’t

be done. So, you know, how are we going to have done it, little company like

ours? It was helped I think because we actually had a piece in The Times at

Christmas of tradition and technology, because that’s really how we’ve always

gone. We make very traditional toys but in a very modern, environmentally

friendly way. And it was a nice piece, it was half a whole pink page. And as Toy

Fair opened we were just inundated with people waving bits of pink newspaper

at us saying, ‘We want to talk to you about this.’ And all of the major puzzle

manufacturers turned up within the first hour at Nuremberg to look at what

we’d done. And they were coming back saying, ‘No, no one’s going to want to

buy this it’s going to be far too expensive.’ And when they actually realised the

prices we were going for, which is more than hand cutting for sure, but the

thing was totally, totally different, we were then approached by three of those

companies within the week after Nuremberg offering to buy the company.

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Whereas at Nuremberg they’re telling everybody, ‘This will never go anywhere.’

But, you know, there was no way we could value the company because we

didn’t know what we’d unleashed and we’re what, 26 years on, 28 years on

from that, we still don’t know what we’ve unleashed. I still find new things to

do with the laser literally every day and that tends to be new techniques, new

materials as they come along. We get a lot of things that people say you can’t

possibly cut on a laser. You know, we’re now cutting ripstop nylon which in

theory should melt. It doesn’t. We have a technique and we’ve set up a laser

cutting system for a tailor that makes bespoke suits, and we’ve written a

database for that. So as he starts measuring you the database predicts what

the other measurements should be so it’s already laying out the pattern for the

material before you’ve finished measuring. When that last measurement goes

in the machine automatically switches on and the suit’s cut out within ten

minutes. So there are just things that you cannot do in any other way possible.

And our strap line was if you can draw it, we can cut it. We’re working with a

laser beam of 0.3 millimetre, thinner than a human hair. That has 400 or 600

watts depending on the machine we’re using squeezed into that beam. The

power is immense. So it vaporises whatever it touches. So unlike any of the

other processes we were talking about that puts a physical medium through so

you get breakout, you don’t with a laser. Absolutely perfect cut, front and back.

The difficulty is then how you handle that to stop any burning, any splash back.

And that’s what none of the other companies that are trying to catch us up on

lasers can do. So one of the other companies for example, I’m quite happy to

name names, has to stain the back of their puzzles brown to hide the burn.

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They cannot do double sided puzzles. And they have a much wider cut so when

you put the puzzle down you can see very clearly the cut marks. We had the

problem that when we go to an exhibition we have to write puzzles up in very

large letters because people think we’re selling art prints, because from a metre

you cannot see our cuts. And that’s what enables us to do everything from the

world’s smallest puzzle, which was a postage stamp cut into 96 fully

interlocking pieces, to the world’s largest which was over 10,000 square feet

and had over a quarter of a million pieces in it. And you still don’t see the joins

on them.

It’s the precision. <0:18:49>

Absolutely. Where we have if you like excelled from what we’re doing we've

taken a process which has been around for decades, you know, lasers have been

around since the ‘50s, we’ve cross pollinated it with very modern cutting edge

technology on how that beam is controlled, hence the medical side of what

we’re doing. And then we’ve written our own dedicated software that puts in

all of those parameters into the machine. So the machine thinks for itself. So

now you can come to me with something totally different, totally new, with the

experience I’ve got I know 90 per cent where it’s got to be on those parameters,

but once we put those on the machine takes over from there and refines it

down further. So we don’t make prototypes. If you come to me and say, ‘I

would like this made please,’ you get something you can go and sell the next

day. We don’t do mock-ups, we don’t do prototypes, they are perfect from

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scratch. So our development time is tiny compared to anybody else. Equally

our development costs are tiny. And that’s why a lot of the work we do never

has my name on it because it’s made for other companies, other brands, other

countries. You know, we went from I think in ’98 we were dealing with eight

countries for exporting, sorry, ’93. By ’95 we were over 60 countries. And that

was particularly selling back to Sweden and Germany which if you can sell

wooden puzzles and wooden toys back to Sweden and Germany I think you’re

doing something pretty good. But that was also going into education in

Sweden and Germany and I think you do that, you know where you are and you

can be comfortable whatever happens. And when we first started we were

very, very twitchy. We thought well if we’ve learnt how to do this, somebody

else can see what we’ve done. For the first six months no, we wouldn’t let

anybody through the door. And after a couple of years we started relaxing. And

now our nearest competitor as I say still makes a wide cut, still burns the backs,

and isn’t really a competitor as far as we’re concerned. But we’ve already got

two generations on from that which we’re not using on the puzzles. So if

anybody does catch us up we’ve got the next, but we don’t need to because

what we’ve got is virtually perfect already. And that’s a two-edged sword with

what we’re doing because we’ve got the best puzzle in the world, the nicest fit,

the nicest feel, the most sophisticated designs, but it’s still a puzzle. And if

that’s a puzzle for a child it has a perceived price. ‘Cause no matter how nice it

is, within a few hours it’s going to be on the floor, the dog’s going to have

chewed a bit, a bit’s going have got lost behind the sofa or whatever it is. So

you have a perceived value. And there are a lot of people in the industry who

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said to us for years, and they were quite right, we had a process looking for a

product. We made jigsaw puzzles because we made jigsaw puzzles, not

because laser was necessarily the best way or the most economical way to

make puzzles. It’s just we had a product, we then had a technique so we kept

on making puzzles with it. And we do make the finest puzzles, I’m quite happy

to blow my own trumpet on that because the amount of awards and write ups

we’ve got, other people think so too.

What do you think it is, apart from the process of how you manufacture them, how

you produce them, what do you think it is about your products that makes them

particularly special? <0:22:19>

Oh we enjoy the design that we do and again it’s all done in-house. So we have

very much a house style that people come to expect. Even when we sell

overseas, yes if somebody sends me a picture and we’ll make it into a puzzle

and send them their picture back, but lots of overseas countries want our

puzzles because they are typically English. And I make no qualms about that.

But in the same way, I’m snot selling a puzzle to a five year old. I’m selling it to

their parents or their grandparents more often, so a lot of the designs we have

will appeal to the parents. We have a lot of humour in them, which the children

may not even see but the parents will because with a puzzle, particularly on a

younger child, you have to engage a parent or an adult with that. If you just

give a puzzle to a small child it’ll chew a bit, it’ll poke a few bits about, then it’ll

get bored and go and do something else. If you spend a few minutes doing that

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puzzle with a child then the child’s fixed to that. And children do puzzles totally

different to the way adults do. A child has no inhibitions about trying a bit,

thumping it, you know, hammering it in or whatever it does, and when it fits

it’s pleased with that, it’s got it’s own reward from that and it goes on to the

next bit. But if you see a child do it and you show a child how to do it, say, ‘Oh,

let’s try this piece here,’ or whatever it happens to go, the child will remember

that and they will always do that puzzle in that sequence. But equally the child

relates the fact that you were pleased with them when they completed the

puzzle. They do the puzzle and, you know, like the dog get the biscuit, the

praise is to be there because they’ve done the puzzle. So there’s a cementing of

a relationship around this which goes far beyond just keeping that child quiet

for ten minutes. And similarly with the range of tray puzzles that we make for

example, our simplest tray puzzles the picture behind the piece and the picture

in front of the piece is the same. In fact we were the first company that all our

puzzles always have something inside. We felt isn’t it awful because all the

puzzles up until we started these in the mid ‘70s you picked a piece out and

what was showing you was a bit of bubbly hardboard inside because that’s

what was inside. And what a waste for the sake of a print, you lose so much

design possibility and play possibility. So that has the same picture backwards

and forwards so it’s an instant match to that piece, but each piece is cut to a

different shape and will not go into one of the other holes. So the child is being

taught if I match this picture to this picture it will go in, pat on the head. That

then extends to the same principle in the shape won't got anywhere else but

the picture behind is different. So you’re putting an abstract into it. So you’re

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now saying I’ve got to find the shape that this fits, so it’s a new learning. We

then add to that by putting more pieces in, so instead of island pieces so that

one piece will go into one hole, you take several pieces out and you’re left with

a big hole. So you’ve got to put them back in in any order that makes that work

without as many clues. So you’ve moved on again in manipulation in turning,

trying. And then you go on further to pieces in the middle come out as well, so

you have to sequence. You can’t put the piece in the middle of the puzzle back

in until you’ve done the pieces around the outside. So you learn to sequence.

With those four techniques you can do anything. Again you’ve learnt all the

necessary motor skills and that can be by the time you’re four.

Did you research any elements of child development for developing these, or did you

experiment on your own children, it works with them? <0:26:09>

The three boys certainly were well used. But equally yes, we used to go to the

local school, the local village school, and then when curriculum came in we

were involved in that. Yvonne was chair of governors at the school so is very

involved in that. And we’ve always involved ourselves with schools because we

used to invite schools to come and see what we did and then we would have

the children make their own puzzle. We’d give them a blank piece of wood,

they’d draw their own picture on it, we then show them how to cut that up. So

from a very early age they’ve actually gone back knowing how it works. And we

equally get feedback from seeing how that works. And yes, because it’s

something I’m interesting in we have spoken to child psychologists and the like

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and educationalists, and we want to work with that. There’s no point us going

down one route if they’re doing something different at a school. But equally we

don’t want it to be boring, we don’t want it to be purely educational, there’s got

to be a fun element otherwise there’s not imperative to go back and do it.

There’s got to be a reason, there’s got to be a reward somehow or there’s got to

be something else that you get from these. So for example we do a range of

floor puzzles that have ten hidden objects inside the picture. So we do a

dinosaur one and in some place there’s a little ammonite fossil or there’s a skull

or whatever it happens to be. And that’s the fun bit. But you can’t find those

until you’ve done the puzzle. So again it’s showing you do a bit of work and you

get something for it. And again once a child learns they never forget whether

those pieces are. You could cover them up and they’ll still say, ‘That’s where the

skull is,’ because they have a differently wired brain. And again because as a

doting parent you’re always going to say, ‘Oh clever girl,’ there is an instant

reward, there’s a gratification. But at the same time without it being a chore,

you’re learning something, you’re learning skills.

Do you think there’s been a development in the expectation of what learning toys can

achieve? <0:28:11>

Yes.

A change in direction or has it remained largely the same kind of ---. <0:28:17>

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Robert Longstaff

No, I think it’s changed quite dramatically. And yes, over the 35 years we’ve

been dealing with children, children get older younger I believe is the phrase

that we use these days. We used to say we would lose somebody around the

age of eight or nine to doing puzzles until they’re usually in their 40s and

they’ve recently discovered the joy of puzzling. It’s probably less than that now,

but then again the breadth of possibilities are there. And without soap boxing

too much, it’s very much easier to get an electronic toy that will buzz and flash

and give that instant gratification and give it to the child and go off and do

what you’ve got to do in your busy life, than there and give the gratification to

the child yourself. I think there’s a great loss in that and I think there’s a great

loss to community and family in that. Off of soapbox.

Coming back to you talked about Toy Fair and other toy manufactures, who do you see

your competitors as being and has that changed over the life of the company?

<0:29:23>

Competitors is difficult. We’re all out there for the same pound, so everybody’s

a competitor these days if you like. But BTHA now tell me that we are the

longest standing members of the BTHA still wholly manufacturing in the UK.

And that’s really important to me because we have people that are trying to

buy our business to take it to China. They don’t want my puzzle business, they

want my software. The laser software is worth a lot of money. A puzzle

business is a puzzle business. So it’s a tricky one to do. So we’re all competition

and then there’s no competition. There isn’t another company out there that

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has the breadth of experience and possibilities of what we do. You know,

within puzzling sure, but if you look at puzzles there have been some trends.

You had the 3D puzzles which something quite different, you had the round

puzzles. But if you look at general puzzles they are the same cut, the same

complexity, all that’s new is a picture. So it comes down to marketing or who’s

got the most TV spend this year, what’s the most favourite character, what’s

the pester power from the kids. And I think it’s a shame because the ability for

a puzzle to be fun and educate has been lost in the, ‘I get ten minutes’ quiet out

of this. It’s a cardboard puzzle, it’s only a couple of pounds, it’s a quiet way of

getting some time.’ And I think that’s a great loss. And so we try and still do

things with puzzles that will still introduce and involve children. We have no

problem, we still go out to a lot of events. We don’t have anybody doing our PR,

we’d much rather go off to a craft fair or to a museum event or something and

take our products along and let the people play with them. And that way we

learn what the children like and what they don’t like. We learn that children

will do puzzles with our range of compact puzzles, CPs which was in CD cases,

and are brainteasers. We have disaffected teenagers who’ll come along and

play with them. And we’ve had the most unlikely looking candidates spend

hours fiddling with our puzzles who normally would’ve had, you know, an

attention span of three seconds perhaps on something like this. If you’d asked

them would they do a puzzle, never in a million years. But because those are

innovative and challenging designs and it engages with a different mindset ---.

Again we have to look at a mindset of a child which is wired differently to an

adolescent which is wired differently to a teenager which is wired differently to

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Robert Longstaff

an adult, and if you look at our ranges of puzzles they work differently to those

groups. Where you start having problems is where you start getting changes.

So, you know, around now the six to seven year old and around now the 13 to 14

year old if you like, where they’re going through all sorts of changes but

including having their brains rewired, that’s when you lose them unless you can

move on to something else. So from a marketing point of view you’ve got very,

very specific categories of this is a puzzle for an adult, this is an educational

puzzle, this is a special needs puzzle, whatever it happens to be. But in the

same way we found one company used to buy from us, buying our children’s

floor puzzles, were selling them back to Bupa care homes and the like for elderly

people that were having articulation problems. And we said, ‘Well why do they

want a Noah’s Ark?’ ‘Well they don’t really want but they want the big pieces.’

I said, ‘Why didn’t you just ask for big pieces?’ So now we have a range of large

pieces, thick pieces, simpler interlocking, depending – we work with the Stroke

Association, with Alzheimer's and with the Arthritis Society producing puzzles

that help those sufferers to do something because usually they’re very mentally

aware and able still, but can’t necessarily get their hands to do what their

brains want them to do. So we give them the tools to be able to do that by

making something that overcomes the problem, but they still get that

satisfaction of doing something without being made to feel like a child again.

Can you tell us about when somebody loses a piece of one of their puzzles as well?

<0:34:00>

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Robert Longstaff

Yes. Oh it’s a great one because I think we were told by – this is definitely going

to get me into the Tower – the Puzzle Library said that person that sends most

puzzles back with pieces missing tends to be the Palace and there the corgis

seem to get them. But because of the laser and because we’re cutting with less

than 0.3 of a millimetre discrepancy between the puzzles, each of our cuts are

absolutely identical. So if somebody loses a piece for whatever reason, whether

the dog’s chewed it or there’s been a move or whatever, we offer a replacement

part service. There’s a possibility that the picture is out by a millimetre or two

because of the mount of the picture at the time, but we can do that. Yes, we

charge £1.50 for a piece just to cover that piece, but that person then has a

complete puzzle again, they’re happy with what’s going on. And what’s really

the nice – last year we had a playgroup asked for a piece of a puzzle that they’d

said had been in continuous daily use since they’d bought it. And we hadn’t

sold that design in over 12 years, so it was at least 12 years old, it was still in daily

use and they’d lost a piece and we could replace that piece. So after a minimum

of 12 years they still had a complete puzzle which was still giving joy every day

in that sort of environment. Card puzzles, yeah, of course they’re cheaper

although I’m horrified at how expensive particularly adult cardboard puzzles

still are. And when you think about it, you’re buying a pretty box with some

bits of chopped up cardboard and a lot of dust sitting inside it. I don’t see why

it has to be that way. But you try and do a cardboard puzzle more than a couple

of times, they start falling apart quite quickly and you then just can’t do the

puzzle. With the wooden puzzles we can. So the whole of our range of adult

puzzles we offer a packing option of it coming in a wooden frame with glazing

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Robert Longstaff

if you want that frame. So when you’ve finished the puzzle you can actually

just clip the glazing on the front and hang it on the wall, because we do a lot of

fine art. And bear in mind from a metre you won't see the joins anymore, it

becomes a print. And from that point of view if you ever want to do it again,

you can just take the four clips off, you take the glazing off, you tip it out and

it’s as precise and as pristine as when it started. In the same way we offer what

we call unique puzzles. So if you have a photograph you can send it to us, we

convert that back into a puzzle, either in a wooden presentation box or the

frame. And the quickest we’ve ever done that for a customer was three hours.

That actually turned up from an American family that had come here on their

way from London, had some photographs of being on the London Eye. They

went into Oxford to do a little bit of sightseeing, by the time they came back

three hours later the puzzle was ready for them. So again we do individual one

off puzzles, we’ve done a million before for one company, so we have the ability

to do everything in between.

You seem to be very sort of agile and innovative in your approach, how have other

companies responded to that and how do they perceive you? <0:37:25>

What a wonderful question. What I will say is virtually all of the cardboard

manufacturers if you phoned up and said, ‘Hello, I’m an artist, I’ve got a lovely

picture, I’d like a couple of hundred puzzles made of this picture,’ or, ‘I’m a

charity I want to do something for there,’ I would think 99.9 per cent of those

companies would pass those people on to me, and again I can name all the

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Robert Longstaff

names if necessary, partly because they know I will do a service and they know I

will do it well, partly because nobody is geared up to offer a service. What every

other possibly company is geared up to is saying, ‘Here is my product, please

buy it.’ We work the other way round. We’re more than happy, yes we have a

product range which is on the website and people can buy, but a lot of the work

we do are for either individuals or for groups or for, you know, you may come

and say, ‘I’d like 10,000 for my supermarket please,’ we’ve done that. Equally

we work with people like English Heritage and National Trust who want 50 of

something for each individual property. We’re perfectly happy to do that

because the flexibility of what we’ve got and the technique allows us to do

that. And again from our point of view if everybody wants a 280 piece puzzle it

doesn’t matter what picture’s on the front of it. We produce most of the ---.

Because if it’s all done in-house we produce our own digital prints in-house, we

do our own laminating, we do our own box making so there aren’t any stages

that something’s out of our hands. So we have the flexibility which nobody else

can give. And how other people think of us? I don’t know. We’re still a small

company from that point of view. At our height I suppose we employ 35 full

time and part time people. But the point is we have machinery that works 24

hours a day so we do turn out a lot of product, more so that most people would

realise. And certainly we were the largest wooden puzzle manufacturers for

some considerable time and go into more countries than anybody else is. And

we have worked pretty much every major puzzle company you can think of.

We’ve done subcontract work for them. More than that, I’m not honestly sure

how we’re held by ---. Because we stopped doing Toy Fair quite some years ago

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Robert Longstaff

now, probably a good five years that we’ve been to Toy Fair, I don’t have that

contact anymore. But equally if anyone’s got a problem or have a job they can’t

do we’re always the first call. We’re always the first call for anyone looking for

promotional material. And yes, the name’s out there that if there’s a problem

we’re more likely to solve it than anybody else. So I think that’s, yeah, I’m happy

with being held in that regard anyway.

And how do you view the others in the rest of the toy industry, broadly speaking?

<0:40:54>

We all do different things. We all have our own niches. We all, you know, those

price bands need to be there. I go to some companies and ten years time I’ll go

back and I’ll see the same products in the same way and I think what a shame.

But we’re not driven by dividends for our super drivers and directors and

investors. I’m allowed a huge carte blanche here to do and pursue what I want

to do. And that’s what we’ve done. Yes, we could’ve become the worlds largest

puzzle company but you’ve seen the range of other work we do and that goes

everything from literally medical research that we’re still doing as you know, all

the way through to the other products including full size furniture, the garden

design. We have our gold medal and we do Chelsea and Hampton Court and

the like. So we have – I have to feed me. I have a brain that will not stop. I

don’t sleep much, I never have and what gets me out of bed the next morning is

the next challenge not the next £100,000 that goes in the bank. And I think I

am cursed and lucky in that I’m driven by something unlike most of my

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Robert Longstaff

competitors, have to be driven because we’re not in that market, we’re not in

that same sort of market. On the other hand we have developed so many

things that have been taken off into other industries and used by other people.

Yeah, I am hugely personally satisfied with what we’ve achieved. All I need now

is about another 80 years and I’ll probably tick off most of the things still on my

list.

And the company itself you mentioned right at the beginning the sort of

environmental concerns, you talked about belief in child development and the

importance of learning and engagement with children and the way that they learn,

how have your beliefs shaped the company in terms of maybe the direction but also

the structure of it and how it works for the company? <0:43:09>

Oh, probably totally. I’m sure I’m a total dictator on what we do here. But

equally we’ve been innovative in new materials. We were the first company,

toy company, to use MDF. And in its early years MDF got a lot of bad press

because of formaldehyde problems. But a) we insisted a low formaldehyde

product was made which we’ve always used before it was in general use.

Equally MDF itself is an inherently safe material. You can chew a lump of MDF,

it won't taste very good but it’s not going to do you any harm. What causes the

problem is dust. And everybody else that uses jigsaws or whatever they do,

make a lot of dust. My laser makes no dust whatsoever. It vaporises what it

touches. So whatever it touches turns into water and steam or a small bit of

smoke and carbon. So there is no dust. You can walk around my workshop, it is

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Robert Longstaff

not a dusty place and yet we’re fully operational. You know, people will come in

and say, ‘Oh you’re not working today.’ ‘Yes.’ But we’re just unlike any other

woodworker because we have techniques unlike any other woodworker. And I

think because I’m not trained as a woodworker ---. At school I did design and

yes, I think I’m a good designer, but that relates to anything. So the first time

we were asked to do a garden at Chelsea we won an award. And people then

came and said, ‘Will you come and design my garden?’ ‘No, I’m not a garden

designer.’ I was given a brief, I have made a design because I’m a designer and I

can see in my head what I want and I can achieve it. It doesn’t mean to say I’m

going to go into your garden and give you want you want in your garden.

There’s a very big difference as far as I see it. But that means any time there’s a

new material available to us we’ve got the experience, the techniques and the

vision if you like to do something different with it. So we move things on very

much faster than anybody else. I noticed this year one of the other

manufacturers is selling a puzzle that is blacked out and if you warm it up the

picture appears. We did that 19 years ago when that material was first brought

out and we looked at it. We actually offered it to Waddington’s at that stage

‘cause we were working with Waddington’s, and they did some sales of the

materials. And it’s a nice little fun thing to do, but generally speaking it took

away the fun of a puzzle. The only way you could see what was there you

heated it up with your hand, the picture stayed for a few seconds, you had to

remember then where everything else was, a bit of pelmanism with a puzzle.

Which has a place, but if you are a serious puzzle doer that’s not what you do a

puzzle for. With the children again they were getting frustrated with it. In the

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Robert Longstaff

same way, we made a whole range of puzzles for a company using the

refractive that moves as you move, you know, the combed plastic – I’m sorry I

forgot the right name – and we made those. But it made us feel ill. Because

you do it so many times that movement really gets inside your head. And again

as a puzzle it made something really, really different, so somebody’s always

looking for something different. But to then actually do that puzzle no child

would’ve kept, you know, they would’ve been motion sick within three minutes.

But they wanted the product made. In the end we said, ‘No we won't do it,

thank you very much, find somebody else.’ And nobody did because I think

everybody else that tried it had the same problem with it. So you have options.

People have got to bring out something new to try and get ahead of their

competition. So it’s always new pictures, but the pictures tend to be the same

1950s nostalgia or trains or vehicles or it’s a kitten sitting on something it has

never sat on before looking cute. You know, all the chocolate boxes stuff which

is there. Yes there’s innovation with the Wasgij and the like and that’s quite a

different thing. And I have to say that’s probably my Beatles mistake. The

gentleman that was doing those sent me one when he first did them himself, a

hand produced one. And I looked at it and I said, ‘It’s very interesting but it’s

not us thank you very much’, and passed it on to Waddington’s, who have done

quite well with it since.

Can you explain what it is? <0:47:54>

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Robert Longstaff

It’s the picture that you see on the box is the picture from if you like behind you.

So you’re doing a reverse picture. So the picture on the box has nothing to do

with the actual puzzle you’re trying to do. It’s a take on all of the old gold box

puzzles from Victory which never had a picture on the front, just a plain box. So

you get something with a title. I’ve got one that we’ve just done that I was

given when I was about six I think. And the title is Galloping Horses. But it’s a

carousel. But you’ve got to have done a lot of the puzzle to realise what it is. So

you get a clue from the title but not enough of a clue. So it’s a beautiful mental

exercise and it’s what an adult puzzle should be as far as I’m concern. It’s

challenging, it’s stimulating and it’s got all the things going for it. And if you

like the Wasgij does something similar to that because you’re just not copying

and saying oh the little bit of, oh that bit of flower goes next to that wheel

there or whatever it happens to be. So again we still do a lot of blank puzzles.

We do totally blank puzzles because you can buy the heat transfer paper now so

you can actually print that yourself and iron on a picture to a blank puzzle, so if

you want to actually make the puzzle yourself. We similarly do blank puzzles

that children can draw on or paint on to do that, so they’re just cut precisely to

start with. So I think our innovation is rather different to anybody else’s

because I just have a much broader palate palette than I can play with. They are

usually confined to what pictures do we do this year, what’s popular? Oh

dinosaurs are popular so every brings out a dinosaur puzzle. And then you

either look and compare, ‘I prefer that dinosaur picture to this dinosaur picture,’

or you’d say, ‘That one’s £6 that one’s £10,’ and price is always the selling point

at that stage. Not the quality, not the subject matter, it’s just does it fit the

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Robert Longstaff

price point. I think puzzles have generally gone that way. An adult puzzle, a

large piece puzzle, 3,000, 5,000 piece puzzle, it’s what you now buy to give to

Aunty Jane at Christmas ‘cause you really haven’t got a clue, you’ve only

probably seen her twice in the last five years and it’s, ‘Oh people like doing, it’s

got a train on it, it’s got a steam train on it, that’ll be nice, she’ll remember it.’

And it just has gone so far, I think it’s down in our psyche, that that’s what you

do with puzzles once you’re not a little kid anymore. And it’s just such a shame

because it is such a medium that you can do so many other things with. And in

some of our puzzles we do interchangeable parts. So that’s not just that we can

give you another piece that fits in, but you can do this so it fits ten pieces along

and only one piece high, or it can make a square or it can make a rectangle. And

each time you do something different with those pieces it makes something

totally different. So it gives you the ability to be creative within something that

has some constraints in. So if you’re not a creative person you do what it says

on the packet and you produce the picture. But you can then turn it into

something else. So some of our CPs, our compact puzzles for example, we’ve

got one called Kyoto and you do the puzzle and you make the little Kyoto

shrine. But you can move all those pieces around and you can make a pagoda.

And you can move all those pieces around and make something else. So the

challenge goes on. And in the same range we do a whole range of packing

puzzles, like the fish and the bird, so they’re made of subject matters that

people would enjoy anyway. And it tends to be male stocking fillers I must

admit. And at the exhibitions it’s always great at this time of year particularly

because we get ladies turn up and say, ‘My husband thinks he’s such a clever,

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Robert Longstaff

what can I get him that’ll prove difficult?’ We always point them at these

phases because they’ve been designed because of the laser capability that they

may have ---. If they’ve got ten pieces in them for example you’ll pretty much

always be able to get nine pieces in. So you think you’re almost there. And like

most packing puzzles there’s more than one solution to them. But because

we’re doing this with a laser and doing it by computer we can check this very

much more thoroughly. The fish for example I think there are 14 fish, two pairs

of fish will interchange. But apart from that, if you put that first fish into that

corner and it doesn’t belong there you can spend the rest of your life doing that

puzzle and you will never get it right, a 14 piece puzzle in a CD box which sells

for £10. But that is probably one of the most complex puzzles you can spend

any amount of money on buying. The one that was marketed a couple of years

ago that you won the million pounds for if you did the puzzle or whatever,

we’ve actually got more permutations within that one 14 piece puzzle than they

have on that. So we like our customers to hate us. If we really don’t – you

know, we’re looking at the adult side rather than the children side – if we

haven’t frustrated them we’ve not worked hard enough in what we’re doing on

the brain teasers. And that’s why they’re graded in a level from 1 to 10 so you

can pick your level of frustration.

Do you advertise at all in magazines or? <0:53:34>

Incredibly little now. When you consider you’ve been doing this 35 years most

people know of us one way or the other which is one of the reasons we stopped

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Robert Longstaff

going to Toy Fair. And we do have a website but that’s not promoted hugely

well. We are changing that around because there is one other manufacturer in

particular that I suppose within general terms is a competitor and tells

everybody they are the only people doing this type of product. Which when it’s

said at trade fairs causes everyone to fall about laughing because everyone

knows we’ve been doing it 20 years longer than they have and still doing it. But

we do have plans for 2012 to expand the business. We are working with a new

social enterprise called Plus who would like to help increase our manufacturing.

So we are putting another laser into their unit in Barnstable and they’ll be

producing mainly the personalised. We do several different types of name

jigsaw puzzle, for example, big puzzle. And again because it’s cut on the laser

we can offer any name up to 22 characters. So although you could go in and get

an Andrew on a mug or a pad, we can do surnames, we can do Islamic names,

we’ve been Japanese characters, we can do anything on this. So again we’ve

got a totally unique range on that and that sells incredibly well. So they’re

taking on that manufacture to allow us to do more of the experimental work

because we’ve got very, very busy with that personalised side. And that’s going

to extend into more of the send us a picture of your own, we turn it into a

puzzle. But we’re also now doing a lot of wedding gifts in that way. It’s coming

from America that people like what used to be a traditional visitor’s book

several people are now doing blank puzzles that you sign a piece of puzzle. But

we’re now changing that around, offering you can have a blank puzzle now for

people to sign but you can put your wedding picture on it after, because we can

do the supplementation print after it’s been cut. So we’re offering that which

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Robert Longstaff

again can’t be done anywhere else. So we’re always looking to do newer things.

We have a huge range of products, it’s not just puzzles. The puzzles I have to

say is a huge love of mine because it’s almost as much fun to design them as to

do them at the other end. And to see the amount that we sell and the amount

of pleasure and frustration that people get out of them is hugely rewarding to

me personally. So yeah, great fun, great fun. Out of all the toy ranges we’ve

ever made, and we’ve done things from historical toys for museums all the way

through to robots and parts for robots, we work in plastics as well, we laser cut

particularly acrylics, we’ve done all of those, but a traditional wooden puzzle

has such a unique feel to it and the laser cut ones have such a beautiful smooth

action when the right piece goes in the right place, it is hugely satisfying to put

two pieces of puzzle together. And, you know, it doesn’t get much simpler than

that nor much more rewarding.

And the ideas for the puzzles they just sort of come to you in the shower or bath or?

<0:57:15>

Yes, pretty much. Again we do need another 80 years to get all the ideas that

I’ve still got out there. They come on from discussions, they come on from

seeing people doing things. Occasionally you’ll see someone try to do

something with a puzzle and you think I never thought about doing it like that,

so you can generate an idea back from that. And you’ll always find somebody

doing a puzzle differently. I’ve got a very friend, Bob Fynn, he used to work for

Hasbro and do all their puzzle testing, he never does a wooden puzzle from the

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Robert Longstaff

picture side. He turns it over and likes to match the grain. So there’s always

something different going on in somebody’s head and you’ve just got to think

as differently as every ---. You see why it’s, you know, from my point of view it’s

so exciting. The possibilities are endless because there’s always another way of

thinking about something, another way of seeing something. Which is why I

personally ---. I think I fell out of favour a bit with the toy business and going to

Toy Fair and seeing the same bit of plastic being over priced, over utilised and

more importantly material robbing to the world over something that had so

little play value or would last for such a short period of time in so much

packaging that you needed half a degree to be able to get the thing out of the

box to start with, using so many batteries and replacing human interaction

with something that goes bang, flash or squeak. I really felt we were just going

in such a direction that I was not comfortable in being involved in anymore.

And at which point I said, ‘I just don’t want to do Toy Fair anymore,’ and my loss

I’m sure. But it’s been interesting to see where the toy industry goes. And if

you look at the last few years’ toy awards you’re going back, all the time back,

you know, Harmer beads a couple of years ago, Fuzzy Felt again, and now we’ve

got Magic Robot out again. Great, I’ve got my original one in the loft. You

worry is that because people have run out of ideas and everybody’s doing

something retro so let’s do something retro and just see what happens, or

whether it’s really an engagement saying, ‘Well people engaged with these

toys then will they engage with them again?’ I don’t know, I think the jury’s out

on that one yet and it all depends where things go in the next year or two. I

think my feeling is there’s no money in the industry, everyone’s have to sell

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Robert Longstaff

things as cheaply as they can to be able to get on the shelves to start with,

they’re getting squeezed from the manufacturers who’ve suddenly realised

they can hold everybody to ransom in China, if you really want something to hit

the shelves in November you pay this amount of money, that there’s not

enough development left in it to be able to come up with new ideas so you’ve

got to look back. And looking back’s not a bad thing, it’s just looking back and

then taking it forward rather than just necessarily looking back. And I do thing

toy selling these days is a big, big business. There’s lots of money out there,

there’s lots of people, reputation, jobs on the line and they treat it whether it’s

nails, biscuits, whatever it is, it’s a commodity, you get it in, you sell it for what

you can do, you make the best profit you can, you move on to next year. And

that doesn’t bring out a lot of involvement. In the same way the other thing I

used to hate about Toy Fair, and we started in the same way. There used to be

the little greenhouse units and you’d get the newcomers, the person that’s had

an idea or the person that’s taken his redundancy money and decides he wants

to go into toy making thinking it’s a lovely world to be in, not the backstabbing,

corporate world it may be, I’m not saying it is. And every Toy Fair that we were

there by day two or three we’d get these people down with their beautifully

made toy in their hand saying, ‘Everyone tells me you’re the guy that will help

me about this. I’ve just had,’ whichever department store, ‘come down and

they would like to have 20,000 of them,’ you know, and your first question is,

‘How many have you made so far?’ and it’s usually, ‘Five.’ ‘How have you priced

it?’ ‘Well,’ and I say, ‘I can stop you here because I know you’re in trouble. You

will have priced it out at maybe £10 an hour because you think that’s what your

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Robert Longstaff

time’s worth, you’ve made a few so you bought the bit of materials here and

you’ve found this and you’ve whatever cobbled it together. And by the time

you actually price this properly and I price it for you meeting all the red tape and

the health and safety and toy safety legislation and get all the right certification

on it, I’m going to be charging you what you’re trying to sell it for.’ And it

happens nine times out of then that’s the way it goes. And that guy goes away

deflated or even worse he will then try and make that 10,000 himself and fail.

For sure, some people are going to succeed. And I’m sounding awfully glass half

empty here because without those people the industry would never have

moved on and it’s really important to encourage them, but I think it’s important

to encourage them rather than slapping them down the whole time. And I’ve

asked these companies that do this buying before, ‘Why do you do it? You

know you’re going to put this guy into bankruptcy this year.’ They say, ‘Yeah,

but in the meantime we’ll have made a good profit on what he’s given us and

next year there’s always somebody new coming along.’ Now when the industry

works like that it’s not an industry I want to work in. And I’m not saying it’s all

like that, and it may not be like that now, but certainly five, six years ago I got

that feeling the whole time. And because we are community based in what we

do here, that’s not what I want to hear. And if that’s what the industry has to

offer it’s not an industry I want to play with anymore. So a difficult one, a

difficult one. But it happens so much.

Was that something that has always been a part of the industry or did you notice that

did it happen suddenly or was it ---. <1:03:38>

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Robert Longstaff

It very probably always has been. I think it’s more prevalent now because there

are companies out there short of ideas, short of their own innovation but big on

cash and they will try and buy ideas, they will try and buy work. And you get an

individual that’s come up with an idea that is new, that’s exactly what they are,

they’re an individual. In the same way we do not fit in any of the moulds that

I’m sure other toy makers you’ve seen, we don’t fit in with the rest of the

industry. But on the other hand you look at the amount of awards and product

ranges we’ve got up there and methods of doing things we’ve got and then go

back and look at the others and say, ‘Well what have you changed in the last 10,

15, 20 years?’ I know which one I will be batting for.

And you mentioned that I think Heal’s was one of the first companies that approached

you and actually it’s a name that comes up quite a lot with the people that were

starting out in wooden toys. <1:04:39>

Really? Yes. Yes, I can believe that.

I was wondering what your relationship was particularly with Heal and if you think

that they were a good or a less good company to work with? <1:04:50>

Well it was good. Heals originally asked me to go with the musical instruments.

And I used to do these – what do they call them, Craftsmen of Excellence

Exhibitions – and I would go and sit in one of their stores and I’d always do it in

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the winter when it was cold in my workshop, because it was nice and warm and

they gave me a good lunch, and I’d be sitting there perhaps polishing a harp or

stringing something or whatever it happened to be. And I would have my ego

well and truly massaged by particularly all these lovely ladies that come along

and say, ‘Oh you must gain immense pleasure from what you’re doing.’ ‘Yes,

very much so, buy something please.’ But it was good fun and, you know, I was

developing me and my character. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, absolutely. The

toy making side as I say, total accident, they just happened to see them and

taken them along. And the deal we were on with the instruments was that if

they sold an instrument, which they expected anyone to order a Celtic harp, but

if they did they were on a 10 per cent commission. So of course we’d turn up

with a box of £300 or £400 worth of wooden toys, little butties and cars and

pull along ducks and the like, and they’d put them up at the prices I’d suggested

and they sold out within three hours, not selling any of their wooden toys over

on the shelves. And I thought this could be really pleasing. And he was furious

‘cause he was still only on 10 per cent. Said, ‘I suppose we’d better work on 10

per cent,’ but the next thing that came in was order for £300 miscellaneous

wheeled toys. And that was it. But without that break I would never, ever have

thought of going into toy making. I’d still be making lutes and harps only now I

imagine. I’m not sure which is the right way or the wrong way. But no, they

were encouraging. And yeah, back then you could be as naive as we were back

then. As I say, we pyrographed our phone number on the bottom, we then got

a call from Galt Stores saying, ‘We would like to order some of your stuff.’ And

at that stage because we had them and Boots and a few other people asking,

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we thought oh, there’s something in this toy making business perhaps we’d

better look into it. So on the news it said there is a Toy Fair. So I said, ‘Okay.’ So

we phoned up, long before internet, phoned up and said, ‘I believe there’s a Toy

Fair.’ So we got into the last Brighton Toy Fair and then we got into London.

What was it the first year that you actually set up? <1:07:22>

That would be, the first toys we made in ’77. The first instruments I started in

’73. So again we were really lucky at that stage because I was playing with

design, the instruments – no, that’s not true. The instruments weren’t keeping

the bills paid but Yvonne was still working at that stage and she was keeping

the bills paid and I was thoroughly enjoying myself with the instruments,

mainly through the V&A I must say who back in those days the V&A would

actually let me go and measure instruments and record their soundings. Now

of course you can’t get within ten feet of an x-ray of instrument. But I still have

all my original drawings from the V&A up there and only half of which I’ve ever

made into an instrument. So, you know, I just need another three lifetimes and

I’ll be okay. But we started doing this from a design point of view and what can

I change, what can I do, and we were picked up by Design Centre in London. So

we had the first ever puzzles that Design Centre gave a sticker on, the first ever

wheeled toys and the first ever dolls house.

And what would you say is the importance of the Design Centre sticker? <1:08:34>

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Somebody else looked at something that I thought was good and said, ‘This is

good.’ And they were professionals at it. You’ve got to remember I’m a dyslexic

biologist designing something that I have no “skills” to do. And for someone to

come along and buy it says you’ve done something right. For someone to come

along as prestigious as the Design Centre and say, ‘You do realise this is the first

time we’ve ever given an award in this category,’ then yeah, it’s great. And you

think, okay, maybe I am doing something right, I’ll try a bit harder tomorrow.

And it’s that stimulus that’s always moved us on and it’s just gone from one

thing to another on that. But we could do it in those days. We went to that

first Toy Fair and we had made by that time a whole range of inch thick puzzles,

animal puzzles, which again got Design Centre stickers, nobody had made

anything like them before. And we put them and I probably had made ten of

each by that time. And yes, we got hit by the Mothercare and the Marks &

Spencer's and the like, and I thought what the heck do you say ‘cause we’d

never even visited Toy Fair. It was only a month before had we said, ‘Is there a

Toy Fair?’ and said, ‘Yes, we’ve got a cancellation space would you like it?’ I said,

‘Okay.’ And I think you’ve seen some of the photos. So there we were with our

little chipboard shelving on spur brackets sitting in the gloom, not having ever

been to one we had no idea what we were going to. And to all the of the large

companies that asked we said, ‘Oh we’re really sorry, our allocation is sold out

for this year, would you like us to take your address and we’ll contact you for

next year’s catalogue?’ rather than saying, ‘I’ve never made more than ten what

the hell do I do now?’ But equally we’d get the little craft shops and corner

shops and art shops and toy shops coming and saying, ‘Do you have a minimum

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order?’ And I’d say, ‘Erm, erm, £50?’ ‘Yeah, great,’ and they’d come and give us

an order because they couldn’t get in to the enclosed stands of Brio or Lego

without either a border pass or a prior invitation or without spending £10,000.

And do you think that that change happened with some companies becoming out of

bounds to everybody? <1:11:01>

It was obviously happening around that time, so that’s early ‘80s. And through

the ‘90s I remember on one Toy Fair walking down three aisles and seeing

nothing but blank walls thinking have I walked out of the hall. And it was

awful, absolutely awful. Whereas we always, and again I think you’ve seen

some of the photographs here, out stand was always open, we wanted to get

people in. We want people to play with our products. We don’t package our

products, we have the minimum ---. You know, it’s great now everyone says

what a green company we are, we have minimum packing. We’ve always had

minimum packing. You saw I think the catalogue we have from 1982 which

actually says that the packaging is the minimum to protect it whilst enhancing

the product. It’s what we’ve always done. And yet when you consider we were

running flexible working hours and a crèche here, we’ve been ahead of the

curve all the way along, not because we’re clever but because it seems the right

way to live our lives. And there’s no way we could’ve gone down the corporate

route. You know, when Hasbro offered me I think it was £2 million for our

puzzle business 10, 12 years ago, there’s now way I could’ve worked with Hasbro

once we’d looked and seen how they wanted it to be done because it would

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have fossilized. We would have carried on making what they wanted on that

year forever. We would’ve lost the innovation, we would’ve lost the ability to

create. And yeah, that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. It’s not the

money, it’s the fact that there’s another challenge out there yet again, even

after 35 years there’s still plenty of challenges out there.

So going back to sort of the pre-laser days where obviously you were still very

successful and it wasn’t to do with the technology of making the product ---. <1:12:54>

No, it wasn’t then.

What do you think was the key to success? <1:12:56>

It must just have been the design.

Just the design? <1:12:58>

And my wonderful character of course. No, it was design. We were doing

things that hadn’t been seen. I’ve always fiddles with the technology that I had.

I’ve got some, I shouldn’t think it’s being made anymore, but some very basic

DIY type woodworking machinery up there, it’s been made by a French

company called Kitty. And at that stage I was also writing for several of the

woodworking magazines and I used to go to their woodworking shows and sit

on their judging panel and their advisory panels and the like. And on one

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Robert Longstaff

occasion I’d talked to these people at Kitty and said, ‘Oh I’m planing rosewood

down to 1.5 millimetres through your machine to make fingerboards out of.’

And they said, ‘You can’t possibly be doing that, it only goes down to 5 mls.’ I

said, ‘No, I’ve made the adapter on it that now does 1.5 ml.’ So they actually

came out to see me and said, ‘That’s clever.’ And the next thing that turned up

was their spindle moulder and said, ‘Thought you might like to try playing with

this.’ So we had that, and that’s gone on and on. You know, I think the most

recent innovation that is probably about six or seven years ago we had Epsom

come see us, their European consumer managers, because I happened to

mention at that stage we’re using inkjet printers for some of the unique puzzles

we were doing. And he contacted me and said, ‘Well you can’t possibly be

doing work of this quality out of that antiquated printer.’ And I was quite taken

aback by that. It was only six months old. I said, ‘Well you’d better come and

see.’ And it helps because he was a puzzle freak, there are a lot of puzzle freaks

out there in all sorts of industry in very high places. Just like every doctor seems

to play early instruments. And he said, ‘Well how have you done that?’ And I

said, ‘Well we changed your software a bit.’ He said, ‘You can’t have done that

it’s all encrypted.’ I said, ‘It wasn’t encrypted very well, look.’ And he said,

‘Hmm, okay, we need you on our side.’ A couple of weeks later a £10,000

banner printer, the first one before they even put it on the market, turned up

with a little label on it saying, ‘See what you can do with this then.’ And I’ve

had that sort of relationship with all sorts of people. I still do that now with

digital cameras for Olympus and Canon. Whenever there’s a new model I get a

preview of it to say, ‘What do you think about this?’ and that’s partly about the

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ergonomics. So I’ve worked with so many things outside of my field, but we

have a reputation as good designers. We’ve worked with Jasper Conran which

is, you know, a pretty good thing to do if you’re in the design world, and we

made a range of toys with him for Daisy and Tom stores. And that was great

fun.

And when was that? <1:15:44>

Oh crikey. Daisy and Tom? 12, 15 years ago I suppose?

And did he approach you, they approach you? <1:15:51>

They approached us and we designed some of the things and they said they had

a few things that they were doing with Jasper Conran and basically we

designed them and sent them off and they changed them about a bit.

Can you just describe the products? <1:16:08>

Oh in one particular one there’s a very nice castle which was built on very much

the lines we’ve got now and we’ve still got the prototypes. That’s the other

thing which again perhaps sometime we can discuss, we do have all our

original drawings, all our original artwork, all our original prototypes. We’ve

kept them locked including the carousel we did for Coca Cola for one of their

anniversaries.

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Do you have the first attempts at laser cuts then? <1:16:33>

Yes. I must admit I tried to find that last time you came, I haven’t found it yet

but I know we’ve got it. It was a hot air balloon and yes, I still most certainly

have that. But we have also the last of our hand cut work that we did for Marks

& Spencer's which was a thing that really tipped the balance for us at that point

because it was so ridiculous and so I hate wasting material. And that’s the

beauty of the laser. We just mentioned the castles. I can cut the bits of the

castles absolutely interlocking. You can take them apart, turn them around

because there’s a taper fit on the laser, and put them together. So there’s

absolutely nil waste of material. And as a green person, you know, that’s really

important to me. Materials are not only just expensive but they’re rare

commodities these days and it’s getting rarer all the time. I think even the

quality of the MDF has gone down over the last five years. So we have that to

keep into mind when we’re designing things as well. Their castle was different

to ours, had more working parts on it, but it was based on one of our models.

And it’s a great product. It’s a shame that things didn’t go quite as they

should’ve done for everybody else. But no, that was a nice product to make.

It sounds as if you’ve learnt as you’ve gone along but in the best possible way. Is that

fair to say? <1:18:07>

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Yeah, and we’ve done it by experience. We do have a number of artists that we

have worked with. You know, there came a point when just my painting just

wasn’t enough. Mine is fairly naive in style and it worked for some products, it

doesn’t work for others. And we’ve worked with internationally renowned

artists. We did quite a lot with a gentleman that used to do all the Blue Peter

drawings so got quite a lot of his work.

What was his name? <1:18:40>

Robert Bloomfield. I always want to say Broomfield, I’m sure it’s Bloomfield.

It’s one or the other. That’s why I didn’t say it at the time. It’s signed on one of

the prints and I’ll go and check. But I don’t think he’s been with us for quite

some time. But they are great. And he also used to do a lot of children’s books,

so we’ve used some of the characters, not from them but altered slightly. He

had the most delightful tiger cubs called Dickie and Tadge and we made them

into bookends. They were absolutely gorgeous. But we’ve equally worked with

people that work with Disney that are internationally known wildlife artists for

example. And yes, sometimes we say we don’t want it lifelike but we don’t

want it cartoony. You know, you’ve got to see what age group you’re going to.

Do you want something with big googly eyes smiling at you or do you want

something looking as if it’s just walked out the jungle. And it’s got to be right

for the right age group. And as I say we’ve got all the original paintings that

they’ve done for us and some of them are absolutely fantastic. There’s some

artwork in their own right. And the one that’s always been our most popular is

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Robert Longstaff

one of Robert’s and that was Ark Alphabet and we’ve been producing that

design before we started laser cutting. And it’s still the most popular design we

run now and yeah, that’s 35 years’ worth which is I think a testament to his

artwork. And on that one if you’re really good you can spot the deliberate

mistake in that we have a pair of umbrella birds for U and unfortunately they’re

both sitting there with the umbrella plumage otherwise they don’t look the

right, only the males have. So presumably they’re an extinct species now, as

only two males were saved.

And in terms of the future of the company or maybe thinking about your children, if

they come and say to you, ‘We’re going to go into the toy industry, we’re willing to

take it over,’ what would your advice be? I mean is that going to happen do you think?

<1:20:56>

We’ve had that conversation. No. No, I don’t think that’s likely to happen. It’s a

very, very strange industry. You either treat it as a commodity and make money

or you treat it as something you love and you have a great time but you don’t

make any money. And I think like most things in life, you know, if you go and

sell guitars in a guitar shop ‘cause you love playing music, you don’t get a wage

for it but you’re doing something you love. And I think that works in the toy

industry equally as well. There’s hardly anywhere in between really in those two

bits. No, the three boys are all very successful in their own fields. They are very

creative, they are good designers. All three of them I think have got their

careers well and truly sorted out and they are all helpful to me in still doing

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Robert Longstaff

design work. Matthew’s doing a lot of design of his own now and we’re making

products for him. He makes an Oyster Card which holds an Underground card,

but beautiful artwork on them, very nice designs. Andrew equally is in Finland

and does a lot of work over there. He understands what we’ve done with the

laser so Andrew is my walking backup. If I meet the proverbial bus tomorrow,

yes, everything that we do is documented and with the solicitors and the like to

be handed on, but equally Andrew understands everything that we’ve done.

Andrew also can read a manual. Matthew won't read a manual. Matthew will

just do it and if it didn’t work the first time it’ll carry on. Richard’s exactly the

same. He will plug at it until it works. Andrew will sit and read the manual and

make it work first time. So all totally traits. But they all have different skills

which again is great ‘cause they complement each other. They've got different

strengths and weaknesses and although they’re very individual and don’t like

working together, when they have to work together it really works as a whole,

it’s a brilliant entity seeing them come together and doing that. But I know

Andrew not only could tell somebody else everything and all our little secrets to

what we do, but he’s that much younger and he’s grown up with computers

and computer design. His design ability I would say outstrips mine quite easily.

And he could take it on to the next level with no problems whatsoever. And so I

know if they wanted to get involved, any three of them, Richard is more hands

on, Andrew is more design, Matthew is more marketing. And they've got all the

skills necessary to help somebody with, but I don’t know any of them would

really want to do it. It has been damned hard work. 14 hours days are the norm

and seven days a week are not unheard of, particularly when we started and the

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of course you’re busy and then you keep it going and then you’ve got ---. So

when everybody else goes home, who’s still up there ‘cause I’ve got a bit of

laser time now, let’s try the new project on the laser. So the family have

suffered by the hours that we work, but equally we’re rather lucky that we’ve

got 10,000 square foot of workshop in the back garden here where I do all the

prototyping. So I do it from home, so they’ve seen more of me than most dads,

even though I work more time than most dads.

And does it feel like work to you? <1:24:26>

No, and that’s part of the problem I suppose. That’s probably why I don’t stop

when I should stop. And because it’s at home you don’t get away from it. And

because I love it, it’s not work. No, it’s not work. Which is why it doesn’t matter

when it doesn’t pay as well as it should do either. I feel incredibly privileged to

have had the opportunity to do what we’ve done. And I think because of that

we have, you know, there’s almost a pressure on us to use it, to do more with it.

And yeah, okay, I’m 60 next birthday, I probably won't live the extra 80 years

that I want to do all these other projects, so I’ve got to get as much time as I

can. But that’s why we now teach so much and we work with a huge range of

other social enterprises passing on our skills. And that’s why I think moving the

laser to another social enterprise that will encourage people to come forward

and flourish and be creative, rather than saying, ‘Here’s a machine, press this

green button for the next 40 years.’ That it can still go on. And in fact they use

an analogy which I think is quite nice in that we never wanted this to be a

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second generation company, we never felt it would work in quite that way

because we are all creative people and we know we would have arguments in

how it goes. There’s no two ways about it. So we’ve never really wanted it to

go that way. But they treat it as saying this is like a third generation company.

This is like having grandchildren running it. You can come and be involved

when you want to, we want all the design input you’d like to come and do

when you want to come and play with us, but when you want to go home you

can go home. And I think that could be the best of all worlds. It frees me from

the day-to-day running of the company to someone who I trust to run it in the

way ---. You know, we have, yes our ethics are very strong and very important

to me and I think they will continue with that because of their structure. They

can do nothing but. They can’t be bought by another company, they cannot

own another company because of the structure of the not for profit social

enterprise. So they are almost constrained leading into what they can and can’t

do. And the fact that I’ve then got more time to give to these ideas, you know, I

might just get a fair chunk of that 80 years’ worth done after all. And that’s the

plan. That’s the plan.

That would seem to be [inaudible 1:26:55]. I’ll stop, unless there’s anything else you

would like to say, anything that we’ve missed? <1:27:02>

Oh only about another five days’ worth. I’m sure that’s probably quite enough

for you.

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You’ve packed a lot into an hour a half, I’m impressed. <1:27:11>

Thank you. I do try.

[END OF RECORDING – 1:27:16]

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