Best Years Launching New Organic Cotton Knit Toys Featuring Baby Buddies and Marine Life
March 19, 2013 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis With the Easter season upon us, it’s a great excuse to buy your favorite little ones a cute cuddly stuffed toy that they will have for years to come.
Baby Buddy. Photo by Best Years.
If you’re looking for something really special that’s organic cotton and handmade, I just came upon Best Years, which is a toy maker that specializes in handmade organic knitted and crochet toys with the requirement that employees work under fair trade practices.
Best Years – which just showcased at the American International Toy Fair – launching over a dozen new toys this month, featuring new baby buddy toys, scrappy cats and dogs, and more exotic animal toys, including a seahorse, octopus, starfish, and humpback whale. These toys all come from the Under the Nile Organic collection.
Best Years also has two adorable Pebble Fair Trade Cotton Crochet Doll Bunnies – a girl and boy version – that are perfect for Easter. They’re handmade dolls with embroidered faces. The girl version is white with green feet and has a cute blue patterned dress. The boy version is also white, with brown sock pattern feet, and a cute red tee shirt with a white star and blue shorts. They are all machine washable, with a height of about 20 in. and a width of about 4 in.
Bunny. Photo by Best Years.
Best Years explains that the Pebble Toys (while not specified as organic) have the great quality of being “made in Bangladesh by a workers co-operative which provides fairly paid employment to women in rural locations. This means they do not have to move into Dhaka, where the standards of living are awful.”
Best Years also talks about the actual production process, saying, “To make Pebble Toys, we first start with cotton yarns in a variety of gorgeous colors. Before the toys can be crocheted, yarns are separated out by the ladies. Then the toys are to crochet,” adding that these centers of production are located throughout Bangladesh.