Eczema
As the parents of three children who’ve suffered to varying degrees with eczema and allergies, we wanted to find baby toys and baby gifts that they could snuggle up with and cuddle at night, without having synthetic fibres against their sensitive skin. Immediate skin contact with man-made fibres, of course, didn’t ease their conditions! Their favorite (but synthetic) plush toys had a tendency to provoke irritation and itching and encouraged overheating, particularly when they were holding other baby gifts closely for prolonged periods.
We stumbled upon organic cotton whilst looking for cloth nappies and wondered whether anyone made organic cotton toys, so we could offer these as baby gifts. Despite searching on the Internet for hours (which then, rather frustratingly, turned into whole evenings!) we only managed to find a tiny selection. It was proving to be an apparently impossible and really tedious task to find a reasonable choice of baby gifts that were made with organic fabrics, on any one website.
Organically grown cotton fibres
Until we started to look for organic baby gifts, we didn’t really know a great deal about the benefits of organic cotton. We just knew that it would be less of an irritant on the children’s skin than the toys they already had and felt that “going organic” was a step beyond ordinary cotton.
We’d previously thought that as a natural textile, 100% “pure” (conventional) cotton for bedding and clothing was the best, affordable, choice we could make for our children, completely oblivious to the staggering levels of pesticides used in non-organic cotton agriculture. Once we started to find out more about organic versus non-organic cotton farming practices, we were really shocked and appalled (please see our “Organic Toys?” page for more information).
So with all this in mind, we decided to form The Organic Toy Company Ltd, offering to others the opportunity to choose from the widest range of organic toys, with the convenience of availability in one place. We do regularly introduce new baby gifts on our site, so please keep an eye out for new additions to our ranges or sign up to our newsletter for updates.
Retaining organic standards throughout manufacturing
Once we started to learn more about how organic toys and baby gifts are made and their certifications, we realised there was scope for a toy’s fabric to lose its organic integrity by the time it became a finished item. Although a the fibres in a fabric might have been grown organically and the textile certified as such, it was important to find out if further manufacturing processes, such as dyeing and finishing, adversely affected the purity of the finished organic toy.
Colouring
Cotton grows naturally as either white, green or brown crops, so some of our organic toys are simply made from these differently coloured cottons, without the use of any dyes whatsoever. However, it is possible to colour organic textiles without introducing harsh chemicals, by using low-impact “reactive” dyes which are safe and environmentally friendly, with some still meeting the strict organic regulations. Any of our baby gifts which have undergone a dyeing process have done so with the use of these eco-friendly non-toxic dyes.
Click here to read more about organic toys and our baby gifts
Click here to read more about The Organic Toy Company and our baby gifts
Click here to read more about the Ethical issues with baby gifts
Offers on our Baby Toys
