ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

17FEET is a small and mighty interactive design group based in San Francisco. They’ve worked with heavyweights including Microsoft and Samsung and local favorites like CLIF Bar and SFIndiefest. When it came time to send holiday gifts to their clients, they looked past the traditional offerings of logo’d t-shirts and fruitcakes. A passion for designer toys had been brewing like a constant drip of Peet’s coffee in the office, and with that in mind, the Feeters set their designs on combining that interest with feeding San Francisco’s hungry.

Brandon Herring, 17FEET’s Creative Director, credits their Head of Operations, Greta Billinger, with the suggestion to make their own toy. Summing up the office enthusiasm, Brandon says, “Most designers are art geeks so [doing a toy] immediately got people excited. Our designers do much more than interactive design anyway. They are all artists in their own right so applying that creativity to a toy design made a lot of sense to us. Plus, so much of what we do is virtual so it’s been nice to design something physical.”

After sketching out lots of shapes, 17FEET chose to make the toys in the form of giraffes: animals that measure 17 feet (the combined height of 17FEET’s three directors). As reference points, they used Kidrobot’s Dunnys, stories on ToyCyte and the DIY toy scene in general. In the end, they made the giraffe more abstract. While the shape is recognizable, it is also still somewhat open to interpretation.

17FEET has been working with Patch Together since mid-September to realize 3D resin figures of their 2D designs. The designers emailed three concepts with turnarounds and Pantone colors to the factory, and Patch Together responded with their first prototype. Of the designs, one will be hand-painted and two will be machined.  The three designers were Brandon, Malea Gadhoury and Lisi Howell who make up the core of the design team at 17FEET. Brandon, who enjoys the toys of Huck Gee and Frank Kozik, finds it “funny that the only boy of the group made a monster with sharp teeth.” Lisi, who is more of a creator than a collector, admits a weakness for the whimsical toys of the Knockman Family.

Greta, a fan of wood toys like David Choe’s new Choegal, offers advice to prospective toy designers: build extra time into your plans for back and forth with the factory. Although 17FEET won’t have the Feeters toys in hand for the holidays (they’re still in progress with Patch Together), they’ve come up with an ingenious way to delay gratification. Technical Director, Arrel Gray (who cites Orko from He-Man as his favorite toy growing up), hit upon using the interplay between “Feeters” and “Feeders” to tie the toys in with the San Francisco Food Bank. Said Brandon, “In the end I think it got people excited about toys who may not have been as excited had it just shown up in their mailboxes. Plus we’ve been able to raise money for the food bank, which is fantastic.”

When asked if we should anticipate a Feeters Series 2, Brandon hints: “I’d love to make another series.” If you’d like to help feed the hungry and score a Feeter in the process, check out Food for Feeters. A donation of $25 gets you a mystery Feeter; $60 is a set of three. Each design is limited to 100 pieces. You can also look at the numbers like this: every $1 donated allows the San Francisco food bank to distribute $9 worth of nutritious food to more than 132,000 local people in need. I justified my acquisition of three new toys with the knowledge that it correlates to $540 of food for the hungry. If you’ve got anything left in your wallet after holiday shopping, give food and get art with Food for Feeters. And happy holidays from ToyCyte.