Most of the machines that shape a day are hidden. Water arrives, lights come on, things move, and the working parts sit behind a wall or inside a casing where nobody looks. Kraul exists more or less to open that casing.
Three Generations, Three Trades
The company's roots go back to the 1920s, when Mara Kraul built a small business on artistic embroidery and knitting. It has stayed in the family ever since, though what it makes has changed completely.
Her son Walter was a mathematics teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School in Munich. Between his classroom and the time he spent outdoors with his own children, he began designing cable cars and waterwheels: toys a child had to build, and which then actually worked. Those first designs are still in the range today. He took over the company in 1976, and in 1988 it became Walter Kraul GmbH, run with his wife Margarethe.
In 1989 his son Christoph joined. He is a meteorologist and a physicist, and the experiment kits are largely his. The family's trades, in three generations, run from needlework to teaching to atmospheric science, and all of it ended up as toys.
Earth, Water, Air, Fire
Kraul organise what they make around the four elements, which sounds poetic until you look at the shelf and find it is simply an accurate description. There are waterwheels and paddle boats for water. Cable cars, windmills, and flying things for air. Marble tracks and spinning tops for earth. Fire arrived later, with candle-driven pieces that turn on nothing but the heat of a small flame.
The company's own explanation of why they work this way is disarmingly plain. Doing a thing and watching it happen, they say, teaches more about nature and technology than the theory does. Assemble a waterwheel and you understand the waterwheel. A child who builds the cable car then builds the station, the valley, and the reason the gondola is going anywhere at all, and the toy is not finished until they do.
How They Are Made
Kraul is small, around ten permanent staff with others working from home, based at Icking in Bavaria. They use local woods, and almost everything is made and packed in Germany. Some of the production is done in partnership with workshops that employ people with disabilities.
Many of the kits carry the Spiel Gut mark, a German assessment that judges toys on how well they play and on their environmental impact, rather than on what they cost.
It is a modest operation making things that are difficult to explain in a catalogue and obvious the moment they are running.