Made by hand. Passed down by heart.
Grandma's Lids is a real family business, built around one homemade idea that lasted three generations because it was good.
Martha's classroom toy.
Martha DeWire taught preschool. Somewhere along the way she made herself a toy: a canister with a slot cut in the top, and a handful of round lids to push through it. Nothing else to it.
She says she thought it up herself — she doesn't remember copying it from anywhere. Her students played with it first. Then her own kids. Then her grandkids and their cousins.
She's still with us, she still has opinions about how it should be made, and she gave us her blessing to make it for other people's kids.
It's more than fifty years old and it still works.
Not a replica, not a restored one — the actual first one. It has been through a classroom of preschoolers, then her own children, then her grandchildren and their cousins, and you can still hand it to a two-year-old today and they'll figure out what to do with it.
That's most of why we're doing this. A toy that survives fifty years of toddlers is telling you something.
Three generations.
More than 50 years ago
A teacher makes a toy
Martha is teaching preschool. She makes a canister with a slot in the top and some lids to drop through it, and hands it to her students.
Then
Her own kids
The toy comes home from the classroom and stays. Her children grow up with it.
Then
Grandkids and cousins
The next generation takes its turn on the same canister and the same lids. It keeps working.
Today
The family takes it on
Martha's family turns the toy she made into a real product — printed to order in orange and white, and made with Martha's blessing.
Why we kept it simple.
We thought about all the things we could add. A light. A sound. An app, God help us.
Then we watched a two-year-old sit on the floor with the fifty-year-old one for twenty minutes straight, pushing lids through a slot, and we couldn't think of a single thing to add that wouldn't have made it worse.
So this is the toy Grandma made, in a material that can take a beating. That's it. That's the product.
Bring one home.
Orange canister, white screw top and thirteen white lids — $34.99. Pre-orders open for a first batch of 20.