Our Story
The shop began with two daughters.
A small family business in Los Angeles, run by parents who could not find the toys they wanted, and decided to go look.
Hafsa and Noor. The reason we have a shop at all.
How it began.
During the first long year of the pandemic, we were spending most mornings at the LA Arboretum with our daughters. We brought the wagon. What started as a way to get through the day became something else entirely: Rashid started riding in it, convincing Hafsa and Noor to push him down the garden paths. Then Irfana. Two adults being surprised into play by their own children.
That year changed how we thought about things. Not screens or batteries or anything that explains itself, but pieces that asked something back from the child. Wooden things shaped by hand. Felt things stitched at a table. Objects built to last long enough to be handed down.
We started writing to the makers of those things. Some replied. Some did not. The ones who did became the heart of this shop. We opened My Toy Wagon in December 2020, and what is on the shelves now is what came back from those letters: colored block sets from a workshop in Germany, a felt world from a women's cooperative in Nepal, hand-carved animals from Romania, vehicles from a family workshop in Poland.
We do not carry everything. We carry what we would give our own children.
The two of us.
Before there was a shop, there was research. Irfana holds a doctorate in History and Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, specializing in Ottoman history. She trained in the longue durée, the long view, the kind of history that measures change in centuries, and spent years in archives painstakingly deciphering handwritten scribal documents few people can read. She brings that same discipline to what we put on the shelf: weighing each piece the way you would weigh any source, for how it was made, who made it, and whether it can survive the way a child actually plays.
Rashid built everything else. A career in real estate and entrepreneurship by day; the marketing, technology, and infrastructure behind this shop by night. He is completely self-made, in the plain sense of the word. And he has a quality that no job title captures: children trust him on contact. He does not perform for them or talk down to them; he simply meets them where they are, and something opens up. Ask anyone who has been in a room with him and a child. It is the reason the shop has the warmth it does.
What we carry. What we don't.
A short list, in plain language.
We carry pieces by named makers.
Every piece on our shelves came from a workshop we know by name. Most we have written to, called, or waited months for.
We do not carry plastic mass-market toys.
Nothing against them. They are just not why this shop exists.
We carry pieces meant to last.
Wood, wool felt, hand-finished. The kind of piece a younger sibling can grow into and a grandchild can grow up with.
We do not carry everything.
If we have not seen it work, lived with it, or held it ourselves, it does not go on the shelf.
The makers behind the shop.
A few of the families and cooperatives we work with.
Curated, never collected.
What we do now.
We translate the work of these makers to families across the United States. We wrap each piece by hand. We answer every email. When something arrives that is not right, we want it back.
We also supply early childhood classrooms across the United States through our educator program, working with teachers who believe in what open-ended, natural materials can do in a prepared classroom.
The shop is small on purpose. We hold it small so we can keep the relationships honest, the shelves curated, and the wrapping done with care.
We hope your first piece is one you write to us about, too.
With care, Irfana & Rashid