I was a very happy kid
...although my childhood was marked by ups and downs. Being raised in an Eastern European country, I witnessed the final years of a regime that proved to be one of the worst in history. Still, I was a happy kid, with just a few toys and with siblings and friends to play together with.
I remember one day I got a set of building blocks named Formo, manufactured in the DDR (German Democratic Republic), one of the few foreign countries we could ever get toys (and anything else, for that matter) from.
The absolute freedom
I am not sure whether that construction set shaped my ability to build things or, conversely, I always had that ability and the set just offered the context to start practicing. What I know is that since that moment, the building bricks became our favorite means of expression. We would build houses, buses, planes and all kinds of contraptions and we’d use bricks to craft just about anything that came through our minds. That was, for me, the absolute freedom and the only constraint was that the number of bricks was not enough for our imagination.
Time went by and I grew up to be an adult. The building block toys shaped my professional life, too. I’ve graduated Computer Science and became a software engineer. Needless to say, what other job could have offered me a better chance to continue building with blocks? The fact that these were blocks of abstract programming language code instead of plastic bricks made no difference for a construction-centric mind.
An organized room and freedom of imagination
I had a great chance to get back to playing with bricks, lately, in my parenthood. This time we had the omnipresent LEGO pieces and the number of bricks was no longer a constraint. It actually became a problem so, to help us have an organized room and freedom of imagination at the same time, I came up with this idea of floating boards that could stack on top of each other, holding the constructions and freeing up space. This is how the TRANSFORMO play table was born.
I know how important toys are for every child's early development. We need those kids to grow up healthy and make this world a better place.
Building things to support their endeavor is my mission.
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P.S. You know, the name TRANSFORMO is actually a tribute to those building blocks that made my childhood a happy one. A transformable furniture for Formo and alike construction toys.
The name of my story. Ah, one more thing: when I had to come up with a name for the product, I didn't even have to think about it, it simply hit me. It was predestined, I have to admit :)
