TOYS OF THE TRADE Owl Toy Craft Owner Makes Unique, Handmade Items Writer / Angela Cornell Photography Provided
It’s crunch time for the elves at the North Pole, as Christmas is around the corner and they are busy making last-minute toys for Santa to deliver. They aren’t the only ones - Owen Wingard, the owner of Owl Toy Craft in Topeka, has been getting ready for the Christmas rush for the last 10 months. Owl Toy Craft is a company that specializes in handmade wooden toys. Their catalog contains a range of items a child would want for a toy barnyard space - barns, stockyards and rail fences, as well as machinery like pickups and trailers, skid loaders and feed trucks, horse-drawn dump wagons and more. All of their barnyard toys are around the same size, and just about perfect for Schleich-style horses (roughly 1:24 scale). “It’s not an exact scale, but we do scale our toys so they can all fit together - 3” to 5” animals would be to scale,” Wingard says. “Basically it’s a scale all our own.”
hour,” he says. “I didn’t have any tools at home for woodworking.” Through the next few years, neighbors and friends asked him to make similar toy barns for their children. “Then we added wagons and elevators, and bales,” Wingard says. “We just added new items every year.” At first, Wingard made toys in his barn after coming home from his day job. “I used to get home at 3:45 in the afternoons, then in the evenings I’d work on the toys,” he says. “I told my wife, ‘If we ever make a business out of this, we’re going to call it Owl Toy Craft,’ because it was a night-owl thing.” After five years his toy-making hobby outgrew the barn, expanding into a separate building in 1998. In 2003 Wingard took a leap of faith and went full time, although on paper Owl Toy Craft wasn’t making enough money to support his family. “We picked up 20 new stores in that first year,” Wingard says. “It’s a gift. God gave the business to us. We work for him. That is the bottom line.”
Wingard got his introduction to the toy business 25 years ago, when he made a toy barn for his son from leftover lumber from his day Throughout the last 17 years business has increased. Every year job at a local cabinet shop. Wingard adds more toys to his catalog. “It took me three weeks to get it done over the course of my [lunch] “Right after the Christmas rush has passed - around January, 28 / THE LAKES MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2020 / thelakesmagazine.com
