History
Creating fun toys that help kids develop their intellectual and motor skills, stimulating their reasoning and creativity: this is the idea—today, we call it our mission—that led Alessandro Quercetti to establish Quercetti & Co. back in the year 1950. Perhaps it was his personal involvement in all stages of production from the very beginning—from product design to the selection of materials, from conceiving shapes to their actual moulding, and from packaging to sales—that allowed his toys to stand out for their innovative distinctiveness. All of them were developed following state-of-the-art concepts that were mostly considered revolutionary at the time, and eventually they marked some important stages in the history of toys.
It all started at the beginning of the 1950s with Galoppa—a motorized toy horse and rider that could actually gallop. Its huge success allowed its creator to turn his great passion to build toys into a successful business.
The end of the 1950s saw the invention of Coloredo, another exceptional idea that was inspired by an old French compositional game made of a perforated carton board and a bunch of wooden sticks with colourful wax tops. Quercetti turned this into the game that ultimately became the factory’s trademark. Made of durable plastic, the white pegboard with its famous multicoloured mushroom-shaped pegs rapidly became a hit, and its sales increased throughout the decades.
A fast and widespread distribution turned it into a popular phenomenon, one of those unrivalled classics that entertained millions of kids worldwide throughout their childhood.
The variety in models, colours, and size allowed for countless compositions, and the fun of always inventing and recreating new designs.
Stirred by his experience as a fighter pilot, and riding a wave of enthusiasm for the first space launches of the 1960s, Alessandro Quercetti created Tor, a rocket that could be launched in the air with a rubber band and fly up to a hundred meters. By applying for the first time some principles of aerodynamics and physics, and inventing a mechanism that delayed the opening of a parachute for a safe landing, Quercetti developed an extraordinarily innovative and technically advanced toy. Tor has been in production for forty years now, and it has long been the best selling Quercetti item, with quite a few millions pieces sold around the world.
In the second half of the 1960s, Tor evolved into Mach-X—a rocket with an unparalleled flying performance that was absolutely surprising for a flying toy; although we stopped producing it forty years ago, it is still today one of the most beloved and treasured toys for all those young boys of the Sixties.
In the early 1970s, a careful analysis and valuation of the specific needs of school-age children led to the production of our lucky series of magnetic toys. Letters, numbers and geometric shapes could “magically” be displayed on specifically designed plastic-framed metal boards that allowed children to familiarize themselves with math, the alphabet, and word structure in a fun, creative, and practical way. Meanwhile the rapid increase in production and orders made it necessary to move our factory to a new and bigger location: the modern multi-level concrete building and adjoined H.Q. block, where today we still design and produce our lines of toys with the same pride and commitment.
Between the 1960s and '70s the company introduced a new line of construction toys, named Nogi, offering a large array of packaging and styles of construction toys, which developed all from a single plate with a Greek fret edge that could be assembled—both on a plane or three-dimensionally—with a series of little brick modules to form patterns and mosaics. Ground-breaking technical solutions, a careful selection of valuable materials, and the professionally and specifically designed packaging soon turned it into a milestone in the history of Quercetti toys, as well as within the international toy scene.
The 1980s saw the invention of two fantastic original toys that were highly innovative for their concept and educational value—Rami and Pallino, which are still on production today and have been awarded some of the most prestigious international prizes. Rami allows a first introduction to computer science and basically teaches children the binary tree and Boolean algebra. Pallino uses patterns of realistic or graphic images made with vibrant marbles to start getting kids involved in colours and computer graphics. In those same years the company gradually expanded its human resources by welcoming the founder’s three sons, whose expertise has contributed to enhance the existing production and to further develop it on an international level.
In 2003, the family of Quercetti toys increased with the introduction of yet another extraordinarily imaginative addition: Skyrail – the Suspended Runway. It consists of a marble run that can be assembled by building a central tower, with a series of adjustable suspended cables around it holding the tracks, where the marbles race down and around quickly against time. Once again we created a toy that featured innovative technical solutions and an incredibly enticing design, with the surprising final result of a combination between a sailing vessel and a roller coaster. And soon after its release, Skyrail won a series of best educational toy awards.
