TFH – the great innovators

When, in 1983, Douglas Garrad and I decided to make toys for handicapped children, there were none. Well. That’s not quite true. Parents, therapists and especially teachers did make and adapt existing toys, but there were none you could buy.

We called our new little company Toys for the Handicapped. It described exactly what our aim was. In those days handicapped, whose origins lie with horse-racing where the best horses are handicapped by adding weights, was a perfectly acceptable word. Then, sometime in the late eighties, the idea was spread that the word came from cap-in-hand. In other words, from the street beggar. The fact that it did not matter, not a bit. Not for the first, or last time, an attractive lie beats a boring truth. So, we simply adopted the initials TFH.

Our initial plan was that we would visit toy fairs and select toys we thought would be suitable. Our first catalog contained this selection. It was almost a complete failure. It was apparent we would need to design toys for our specific users.

I had an outdoor toy business with a factory making swings, slides, jungle gyms, that sort of thing, so the first product was our full support swing seat. It was an instant success. Ever since that time, TFH has been a great innovator. We are never frightened to try something new that might help make life a bit more enjoyable for our clients. We’ve had some great successes and some spectacular failures, but, as they say, you win some, you lose some. I should add that there are few pleasures in business that can compete with designing a new toy.

We don’t patent, we don’t copyright. Many of our successful toys have been copied. In the early days this was annoying, but we’ve learned to live with it, and it has meant that children, teens and increasingly grown-ups have benefited from our inventions, even if they got them from someone else.

A number of our early inventions have been superseded, but here are a few that are still in our offering; some have been copied, none bettered:

The full support swing seat - child 1984, teen, 1987, adult 1990, the first fold away swing frame 1992, the first wheelchair swing in 1997, the Frammock, 2019, the first wheelchair accessible sand and water tray 1995, the first mobile sensory room – the Vecta, 1998, the hurricane tube, 2006, the first rocking chair- the Mindflow steady chair 2021, the lollipop jungle 1996, the Squeeze Machine, 2019, The first bouncing chair, child 2019, teen, 2024, small adult, 2026, Snap on projection wheels 2018, the projection tunnel, 2022, the wobble garden 2023, Pixels, 2023, the Chromatheme, 2026, the genie controller, 2020, the floor-pad and podium sensory room controllers, 2025, the Huub, 2026, the conductor, 2026.

Douglas Garrad died in 2023. He was a marvelous and inspiring man. His vision can be summed up in his own words, “Every child deserves a childhood; play is fundamental to childhood, so let’s make the toys.” I like to think TFH is still delivering his ideal.

-Tony Tidmarsh

TFH President and Co-founder