We get asked this a fair amount: out of every toy category we could have started with, why golf tees and footbags?
The honest answer is that both categories are brutal proving grounds for a new material. Golf tees snap under real force, get driven into hard-packed dirt, and take a beating from actual swings — not gentle handling. Footbags get kicked, dropped, stepped on, and left outside more than almost any other toy category. If a biodegradable material was going to fail quietly under normal use, these two categories would expose it fast.
We wanted that pressure test before we put our name on anything gentler. EcoTees had to survive an actual round of golf, not a lab simulation, before we felt good calling it durable. EcoRoe had to hold up to the kind of abuse a genuinely well-loved footbag takes over a season of use.
Passing those tests is also what gave us the confidence to move into EcoPip — a fill material other manufacturers put inside their own products, where performance failures are much harder to walk back. Starting with the hardest use cases first meant that everything after it was, relatively speaking, the easy part.