Rubbabu toys are made from carefully sourced ingredients at our family-owned factory in India, following fair trade and eco-friendly practices. We support skilled artisans and migrant laborers who have left their villages in search of a livelihood. Each toy is made with care and love, it's not mass produced by machines. Each Rubbabu toy is unique, please accept any minor imperfections on the surface. 

First and foremost, the ingredients

We use pure natural rubber foam. Some people add fillers, or chemicals to the rubber, but we use the pure rubber from the tree with no additives. Rubber is drawn from trees without affecting their health or longevity, making it a renewable resource! That's as eco-friendly as it gets. 

We use quality-made fine nylon sourced from a respected and trusted manufacturer in Spain. The nylon flock is completely non-toxic and passes every international safety test with flying colors. We have never had a quality issue from our supplier, and the safety labs return the tests with a "Not Detected" when we test for lead, phthalates and heavy metals.

The flock is applied using a very safe adhesive, specially formulated from ethyl alcohol. Absolutely no question of formaldehyde, we don't even use words like that at our factory.

We make our paints using pigments imported from the United States.

The process

In one word, baking. Actually it is quite like a cake. First, the rubber is beaten in a mixer to make it airy and foamy. Then this foamed rubber is poured into molds, and heated till it sets into the shape of the toy!

After being baked and dried, the soft white rubber toy is inspected by the quality team before it's painted with a rubber based non-toxic paint. It then gets put on a ceiling conveyor that takes it around the factory (saving space) until it dries. After another round of inspection, it goes to the flocking room.

The flocking process is tricky, and requires a very skilled technician. In this process, tiny lengths of nylon fibre are glued onto the toy. The way it works is that when thousands of fibres exactly the same length stick out from the toy at right angles to the surface, they create a very smooth surface. Ta da! Tactile heaven created.

Design and philosophy

Rubbabu toys are designed by a fabulous team of designers in India who work with the founder to create the simple, rounded shapes we love. We are guided by the philosophy that children need only very simple toys, and that they know how to learn much better than we know how to teach. So all we need to do is make toys that are fun and safe, and they'll do the rest!