How a Failed Mold Became a Brand
Most brand names come from a brainstorm. Mine came from being too poor to print labels.
It started with a mistake
I was making small hands out of polymer clay — and making molds from them. The molds set. The clay didn't work the way I needed it to.
So I poured resin in instead. Not because it was the plan, but because polymer clay wasn't suitable and resin was what I had.
That was the first piece. A failed mold, filled with the wrong material, that turned out to be exactly right.
They were supposed to be magnets
The plan was magnets. That's genuinely what I set out to make.
Then people started asking for earrings. So I made earrings — and fell for it completely. I've always loved earrings; it just hadn't occurred to me that I could be the one making them.
The brand didn't arrive fully formed. It got pointed in the right direction by the people who found it early, and I followed.
The name came from a stamp
I needed labels for the pieces. Printing costs money I didn't have at the time, so I carved a lino stamp instead and printed them by hand.
I wanted the label to read like a warning — the kind of small print you find on the back of mass-produced packaging. This is Not a toy.
It was meant to be a joke about product labelling. A small dig at the language of mass production, printed by hand, on the one thing that wasn't mass produced.
Then I looked at it properly, and it wasn't a joke anymore.
Why I kept it
This is Not a toy is a warning that only exists because something is small, colourful, and looks like it might be. It's a phrase that means: this is not what it appears to be. Handle it differently.
Which is exactly what these pieces are.
They're small. They're bright. They look playful. And they're made one at a time, poured and hand-painted in acrylics, in small numbered series — the opposite of the thing the warning label was invented for.
The name says: this is something else. Look closer.
What hasn't changed
Everything is still made from scratch, by hand, in Ljubljana. Still in series, not single pairs. Still slower than it needs to be.
And the labels are still hand-printed with the same lino stamp I carved at the beginning. Same block, same ink, every single one pressed by hand. I could have them printed properly now. I won't.
The first pair came from a mistake I didn't plan for. I've stopped treating that as an accident — it's how the whole thing works now. Something goes slightly wrong, and I follow it instead of fixing it.
That's the difference between something made by a person and something made by a machine. The machine can't be surprised.
Handmade in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Small numbered series, shipped across the EU.