Buy Online

In an age where everything seems to be electronic, it’s nice that most people still retain a love for traditional wooden toys.

There are two creative sets that we have sold for years – and the sales figures are always high for both the Domino Rally and the Marble Maze.

The Domino Rally is absolutely superb. Made of wood, this set has got the lot – steps, a slide and at the end of your creation, the aim is to get the bell to ring as the final domino falls. It also comes with a cloth storage bag. It will help children to improve a variety of skills including hand/eye co-ordination, visual tracking and creativity. With almost 250 pieces it will keep the family entertained for hours!

The Marble Maze consists of  22 wooden building blocks of varying shapes and sizes, with various holes cut into them. The idea is to turn the pieces into a creative marble run so that the marbles (also included) run from the start of your structure to the finish. Models can be tall or wide, complex or simple – it’s all up to the creativity of the builders! A wonderful and challenging construction game!

Both products are part of a 20% off offer being run by The Happy Puzzle Company for the next ten days – click here to find out more!

With the Half-Term holiday almost upon us, this fabulous offer features our two best selling sets for 3 to 12 year olds from the last twelve months! You can buy one set, or for the next ten days, choose any two sets and we'll send you a third set completely FREE!

WaxiDoodles are modelling sticks coated with a wax formula so that they stick to almost any surface (without leaving permanent marks behind) and to each other, with just fingertip pressure, making them great for 3D activities and model building. A hugely creative activity that can help children understand and feel letter and shape formation. Brilliant as a learning tool, the colours don't blend and they can be used again and again! The set contains 150 WaxiDoodles plus a durable playing board and an activity booklet. For ages 3 to 12.

With The Amazing Flower Kit, your child will love creating their own foam flower bouquets or arrangements… and there’s no mess either! This fabulous puzzle craft kit will keep your children thoroughly entertained for hours! The set contains everything they will need to create a stunning bouquet of 48 multi-coloured flowers (there are eight different kinds of flowers!). There’s no need for glue or even scissors! It all just pops apart and goes creatively together! For ages 5 to 12.

This is a really great offer for fully reusable craft kits that will keep your children and grandchildren amused for hours!

Happy Puzzling!

Gavin Ucko - Managing Director 

Imagine the bounciest thing in the world. It’s probably very bouncy. So now, in your mind, double its bounciness. You’re probably now about half-way to imagining the extraordinary Super Sports Disks which I found at the New York Toy Fair. The fun is astonishing, and of course there are other benefits.

Each set contains two trampoline-like disks of various sizes that will get your children moving, playing together and performing tricks, whilst developing a whole range of skills, including hand/eye co-ordination and concentration. Then there are the special ‘string’ balls which perfectly take the full force of the disks. Very quickly, my own children were whacking the ‘balls’ almost out of sight into the blue sky and certainly higher than the roves of the houses around us – try rallying that as is falls out of the sky!

It was, quite simply, one of the most fun things we’ve ever done. I particularly like the fact that the disks come in different sizes – it makes the concept manageable for some of the younger members of the family.

It’s so clever, the only thing that you are left wondering, is why nobody has ever thought of making this before!

Buy the Super Sports Disks online here

For almost nineteen years, The Happy Puzzle Company has been running birthday parties and programmes for children aged from 5 to 16.

Divided into teams, children come face-to-face with all sorts of weird and wonderful 3D puzzles and challenges, probably best described as being halfway between the ‘Crystal Maze’ and the ‘Krypton Factor’.  It’s one of the most amazing hands-on parties that your children and their friends will experience!

Each team simultaneously solves the same puzzles and challenges, with an emphasis on completing things rather than competing – so everybody comes away with a huge smile on their face and feeling like they really have achieved something special! It’s all a huge amount of fun as the children turn the apparently impossible into the possible, solving a wonderful and varied series of hands-on puzzles and challenges. All of the children will manage to solve their puzzles, feeling an amazing sense of achievement as they surpass their own expectations. It's not a competition - all of the children will come away with a big smile... and feeling like a winner!

There are penguins that need to be balanced on floating icebergs, moving optical illusions, giant road maps that need putting together, marble runs, code-breakers, squiggly puzzles to solve and lots, lots more. It's a huge amount of fun for everyone!

Almost one million children have now taken part in our programmes… if you’d like to know more about booking one, click here!

Nineteen years later, both of the above still hold true and I am fairly sure that we are as successful as we are today because of those things. Our customers know, beyond question, that when we say we'll do something, we will. That includes an honest assessment that things can and do go wrong – but when we mess up, my goodness do we bend over backwards to put things right.

Strangely, this commitment to outstanding customer service comes as a surprise to some people, and they actually don't believe it. About two years ago, we started including a 'thank you' letter, signed by me, with every single order dispatched from The Happy Puzzle Company. In that note, I gave my e-mail address and contact telephone number, and told customers that if they had any questions, queries or complaints, then they could call or write and I would personally take the call or respond to the email. I have since had a generous handful of calls from customers who had nothing whatsoever to tell me – they just wanted to see whether or not I really would take the call.

Any company these days can produce a bright, glossy catalogue and it's even easier to put out a stunning website. So much so, that it is often hard to work out whether the company you are dealing with is a huge multi-national or a one-man band. To suggest that all companies could have their MD / CEO taking calls personally is unrealistic, so we tend to assume that it won't happen. But if you can, it's so important. In our case, we build customer relationships because we want to know what is on the customer's mind. It helps us to grow… what are we doing that the customers like and what don't we do that we ought to be doing? It's this information that drives you onwards and upwards.

Last year, four days before Christmas, I sent out 19,000+ emails to customers who had ordered in the run-up to Christmas. I wasn't selling anything and I had no ulterior motive – I simply wanted to say 'thank you' to the people who were helping us to stay around, and to let them know that however large or small their order, we really appreciated it. And we meant it. Never once in the nineteen year life of our company have I lost touch with where I have come from. I started as a university student with a phone line in my bedroom and built things slowly from there. It has been a long and at times bumpy ride, but from my heart, I really appreciate and never take for granted the success that we have had. My e-mail generated hundreds of responses, mostly from people thanking me for my 'thank you', but there was also plenty of constructive criticism and ideas. I read every single e-mail and took as much on board as I could!

Providing outstanding customer service is not only about offering a great service with a friendly, knowledgeable voice at the end of the phone, it's about meaning what you say, sharing in the joy of a customer who loves what they have received, being genuinely sorry if something has gone wrong and equally determined to put it right.

I have been blessed with the most incredible team. They work long hours, deal with non-stop enquiries and questions and constantly with a smile on their face. I appreciate them greatly and I believe they know that.

Together, our determination to get things right for our customers will continue to be at the very top of our 'to do' list!

Our customers need to be cared for and offered something special every now and again! That’s why, for us, ‘Buy Two Get A Third Free’ offers are so important.

In any order, part of the cost of that order to the company is in the postage and packaging. Even though most companies charge P&P on top of what you are already paying, it often doesn’t come close to covering the real cost of sending the parcel. However, postage costs don’t rise proportionately, so often, when a customer buys three items, the company improves its profit margin, because the unit cost of the postage goes down. Sometimes, it’s nice to be able to effectively offer that back to the customer in the form of a multi-save. The customer gets a bargain and proportionately the company still has the same average profit that it would have if the customer had only purchased one item.

Of course, there has to be just enough of a profit margin in the product to be able to offer the 3 for 2 – but if you can, everybody wins. To the customer I will say the following. These days we spend a lot of time looking for the catch within an offer. Perhaps there is one! But sometimes as well, the company concerned just wants to offer something special to its customers, to make them feel appreciated. We are in business to be successful and we want our customers to buy as much as possible, but we also want to do the right thing – it’s not always about the profits!

Last week we launched a seven day ‘Buy Two Get A Third Free’ on nine of our Top Ten products. We sent the offer to 68,000 of our most valued customers. Why did we do it? Simply because it felt like a nice thing to do! End of!

Click here to see our offer page
and grab your 3 for 2
before it runs out
THIS THURSDAY

Ah… so you assume I am talking about an M25 nightmare! Stuck in a ten-mile tailback with 1/2/3… even 5 screaming children in the back of the car… now that is a nightmare! Trust me, I have a ten year old, eight year old and a five year old – we’ve been there and done that! But actually, I am not talking about that type of Rush Hour…

About 14 years ago, a Japanese puzzle inventor called Nob Yoshigahara, created a puzzle game called Rush Hour – it’s a series of puzzles involving a little red car which is jammed in a grid of multicoloured cars and lorries and which needs to escape from the gridlock. The puzzles get harder as you progress, manoeuvring the vehicles backwards and forwards in a sequence until you manage to free up a routeway for your little red convertible to escape off the grid. Simple and genius. Five million copies sold, more awards than most people can count and a plethora of spin-offs as well (there’s Rush Hour 2,3 and 4 in case you worry about running out of challenges, Safari Rush Hour, Railroad Rush Hour, Ultimate Rush Hour and Rush Hour Junior).

The genius of the game is in its simplicity – everyone playing, young or old, understands that feeling of gridlock… and the relief that comes with your escape. When you find yourself stuck in a real jam, there’s often nothing you can do – this time there is! You can plot your own escape and be in control of that wonderful feeling that comes when you realise it’s all over! Then you do it all over again, just to prove to yourself that actually, you are smarter than the traffic jam!

Hidden within the simplicity of the puzzle is a truly unbelievable benefit for every child and adult – the development of personal learning and thinking skills – concentration, sequencing, problem solving, visual perception, hand/eye co-ordination, fine motor skills, logical deduction, lateral thinking… every single skill I have just mentioned is being nurtured through playing. ‘Learning through play’ … one of those buzz phrases of the last few years. It’s easy to get a child to sing and dance when they think nobody is watching, but how do you get them to learn if they think nobody is teaching?

Such has been the power of Rush Hour, it has lead to the creation of hundreds of other similar types of games, some of them even more brilliant than Rush Hour itself! What they all have in common is ‘graded activities’ … the puzzles are divided into lots of bite-sized challenges that get harder as you progress, meaning that the child needs to spend very little time on each challenge before feeling that they have really achieved something significant. There are lots of advantages to this. If a child has difficulty concentrating for long periods of time, they need to spend a matter of minutes on each challenge before feeling that they have achieved something tangible. That in turn builds confidence and a desire to stretch your self a bit further. From a parental point of view, a spare five minutes to spend with your child can result in a wonderful feeling of achievement for both of you…

Up and down the UK, paediatric Occupational Therapists use Rush Hour with dyspraxic and dyslexic children and when advising parents on which games to use at home, this is often first on the list. I know this, because every year I take calls from hundreds of parents who have been sent to The Happy Puzzle Company to buy puzzles and games from us that will help their child to nurture various skills.

Of course, I have picked Rush Hour as one (particularly powerful) example of how fun puzzles and games really can help to improve your child’s skills… there are lots of similar ideas out there, but if Rush Hour tickles you then pop over to our online store and get it for yourself today! Buy Rush Hour Online Today