The creative hobby brand toucanBox has won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade.
The brand, launched in 2012 to empower children through creative play, also encourages them to develop into curious and critical thinkers, via personalised educational arts and crafts activity boxes for children.
Activities are designed by a team of former teachers and educationalists to ensure that each cultivates a child’s natural curiosity to learn. More than five million kits have been shipped to children across 30 European countries, and in the US, and toucanBox is now one of the fastest growing educational product companies in Europe.
In the past five years, the brand quadrupled its revenues to £7.4 million and has ambitions to build a £70 million revenue business in the next 10 years.
The Queen’s Award for Enterprise is the most prestigious business award and accolade in the UK. toucanBox will wear its Queen’s Award Emblem for the next five years.
Founder Virginie Charles-Dear said: “Last year was quite exceptional. We were able to grow 40 per cent despite the pandemic and Brexit, and distribute more boxes than ever before to children up and down the country, and has cemented it as our biggest growth year since we launched.
“We’re just delighted that, despite the climate,we’ve been able to keep putting our products directly in to the hands of our wonderful young crafters, particularly at a time when schools across Europe and indeed, around the world, were closed, and the need to keep children’s imaginations active and engaged in thoughtful play.”
