Over the weekend, my family drove to a cabin in the woods for a short getaway. On the two-hour-long drive there and back, something magical happened: My 4-year-old daughter, Ella, didn’t need our attention, nor did she once ask, “Are we there yet?” And no, she wasn’t glued to a screen. She was completely engrossed in a new storytelling toy called Toniebox that just landed in the U.S. from Europe.
Tonies, the company behind this product, was founded in 2016 by two German fathers, Patric Faßbender and Marcus Stahl. “We loved listening to stories on tape or CD when we were young, but by the time our kids were born, none of these technologies existed anymore,” Faßbender says.
Instead, kids tend to listen to stories on tablets or smartphones that are packed with other apps that could distract young eyes. Or they might use smart speakers, but these often get the commands wrong, especially when a child is speaking. (Case in point: My daughter recently asked Alexa to play Cinderella and the device responded with an explicit rap song.) The Tonies dads couldn’t find a simple way for a child to play stories on their own, without parental supervision or the possibility of serious malfunction.
After the initial setup, the device does not require Wi-Fi to operate, which makes it an entirely closed ecosystem that is not connected to the internet. This will be important to the 58% of parents who worry about hackers using smart speakers to spy on kids. The box itself costs $99.99, and the figurines cost between $11.99 and $14.99. They’re available on the Tonies website, and at Amazon, Target, and toy stores.
“Most kids don’t understand the symbols that are obvious to adults on tech devices, like the ‘start’ button, ” Stahl says. “So we created our own system.”
Tonieboxes have become popular in Europe, where the company has already sold millions of units. We’ll have to wait to see whether they will take off in the $27 billion U.S. toy market, where they will be competing with the hundreds of other toymakers that flood the market with new products every year.
But the Toniebox comes at a good time. During the pandemic, with kids spending more time at home than usual, many parents feel bad that they’ve been putting their children in front of screens to keep them occupied. This toy is on the expensive side, but given that it promises to keep kids occupied for hours without a screen, it’s an appealing idea for families in lockdown.