Today’s Toy Marketplace: Blokko Weaves Storytelling, 3D Printing & Digital Design into One Platform

‘We are Blokko. We are the toy company that doesn’t make toys.’

Blokko makes it clear right away that they aren’t your conventional toy shop. They are, however, champions of stories and how artists translate them into the third dimension.

At Blokko, artists are invited to ‘make their heroes.’ They empower other toy enthusiasts to design and 3D print toys. That’s not all though — Blokko really encompasses the triumvirate of the processes that surround the making of toys: Storytelling, roleplaying, and building.

Establishing themselves as the heroes for toymakers everywhere, Blokko has one mission overall, and that’s the democratization of toys — allowing for a world where anyone can become a toymaker without requiring a mega-marketing team and a huge reserve of capital up front. Their team really believes in the connection that can be made between storytelling and our vast capacity to imagine, and create further when inspired.

The world of 3D printing and toys is a natural combination, and we’ve covered this area regarding traditional processes of 3D printed toys being created and sold. The democratization of toymaking though is becoming more and more popular as the market is generally known to be a difficult one, and an expensive one to crack. Blokko aims to change that.

With the idea that ‘the best stories can be created by anyone, from any part of the world,’ Blokko has created a platform for bringing storytelling and toys together by offering a venue for publishing of stories which can then be translated into toys by digital designers. Storytellers are offered a space where they have an automatic audience (what could be better?), and the artists build the toys around their story and price them to sell. Upon sale of the items, everyone receives a percentage.

The Blokko team — recently chosen to exhibit at the Web Summit, one of the largest tech conferences in Europe — is currently in the development process for a 3D printer client software that will work with Ultimaker and RepRap 3D printers. The name of the company is derived from a template they are currently designing, which is called blokk. Blokk is a design template that its designers claim is limitless for creating ideas and toys, and offers ‘open buildable worlds like never before.’

One of Blokko’s first toy prototypes.

If you are a writer who would like to see your characters jump off the page and into 3D form, the Blokko platform may inspire your writing even further, as you can actually see your characters start to come to life — and, even more fun, garner some income in the process. The same goes for digital artists who are full of creativity and inspired to illustrate ideas from what they read in a story. If those are areas you are interested in or want to learn more about, be sure to follow Blokko. You can bet we’ll keep you posted here as well.

Are you a writer who enjoys illustrating as well? Would you like to have your storytelling translated into toys for sale at the Blokko marketplace? Tell us about it in the Blokko forum thread at 3DPB.com.