In 1988, three members of a Latvian family started a company and called it Saime, which means family. For about ten years they made a variety of things from wood and, in doing so, learned the material properly.
(VARIS Town Builder 107 Part Set.)
Then, around the year 2000, they used what they had learned to make one thing of their own: a wooden construction set. They called it VARIS, and eventually the set gave the company its name.
A Set of Blocks in Unusual Company
In 2009, the architect Chris van Uffelen published a book called Toy Design, surveying the 115 toys he considered most significant by design, quality, and history. The list contains what you would expect: Lego bricks, Barbie, Playmobil, the Game Boy, the Rubik's Cube, Settlers of Catan.
It also contains VARIS, designed by Maris Peics, from a family workshop in Latvia.
That is not a small thing. A wooden construction set from a country of under two million people, made by a company that had spent its first decade making whatever wooden goods it could, ended up listed beside the most recognisable toys on earth.
Birch, and a Repaired Piece of Ground
VARIS work in birch, a hardwood that resists splitting and takes handling well, which matters in a toy meant to be built and rebuilt rather than displayed. They say the wood comes from managed forests, and that the factory was built on the site of an old dump, which they describe as healing a wound in the ground. That is the company's own account of itself, and it is a more interesting thing to claim than most.
Their sets are now sold across Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Norway, Britain, and a dozen other countries.
The pieces themselves are plain, and deliberately so. A construction set is not finished when it leaves the workshop. It is finished, briefly, whenever a child decides what it is, and then taken apart and finished again as something else.