Inspiration
“8.5 million new, perfectly good toys are thrown away every year in the UK”
Being parents, and a team who are concerned about sustainability in our world, it's worrying how over such a short period of time so many toys, games, books, puzzles and other childrens items can become unwanted as a child quickly grows up. Most of these toys at best end up in storage but are usually thrown away.
There are a number of local businesses and charities who could make use of these items.
What it does
Our idea connects local businesses and charities with children and gamifies the process.
Children are rewarded with Toykens for donating unwanted toys, books, games and other items.
How we built it
Our implementation is enabled by and fully embraces the MACH mindset.
Utilising a composable architecture allows us to focus our effort and attentions on the two portals - one for children and the other for retailers/charities. These are both built in React utilising NextJS for server side rendering and secure server to server integration with MACH services.
Contentful
Our MVP is translated into two languages, English and German via Contentful which provides content and transitions for the two portals.
Post MVP Contentful can offer so much more than content. We are able to integrate other services such as headless personalisation which can further help match toys to retailers and has vast potential with our 'Toyken Trails' concept and the Toyken transaction (payment for goods using Toykens) space. i.e suggesting items, games or events where children could spend Toykens.
Commercetools
Commercetools is the engine behind the whole platform, doing much of the heavy lifting and saving us countless hours of bespoke development.
Both parents, children and retailers/charities customer accounts, authentication and identity are persisted, managed and mastered by commercetools.
When children donate items they are added as products to the Commercetools catalog. The assignment of products to retailers and the process of postage/collection is also facilitated via fields on the variant.
Commercetools also persists retailer preferences via custom objects and the links between parents, children and retailers/charities.
Algolia
Algolia is a headless, API-first managed search service.
We have deployed a service which hooks into Commercetools' publish event and pushes product data (donated items) from Commercetools into our Algolia search index.
The index also includes location data which allows us to present relevant local items to retailers/charities.
TalonOne
TalonOne is a powerful, headless, API-first managed Loyalty engine.
We have configured TalonOne to integrate with Commercetools customers (children) who upon creating an account will behind the scenes open a virtual web wallet within the TalonOne platform.
The web portals are able to securely interact with the virtual wallets to show children their current balance and facilitate spending their Toykens.
TalonOne is extremely powerful. There is huge potential to extend reward and loyalty schemes in the future utilising the platform.
For example we could create a loyalty scheme for retailers which would reward and incentivise the retailer for using the platform.
We would be able to create rules stating that if children donate X number of items within a certain timeframe or X types of item they are moved into a gold group who are rewarded with more Toykens than the standard group.
There are endless possibilities when we consider the potential for the platform with respect to loyalty.
Challenges we ran into
We gave ourselves a huge amount to build in such a short space of time. It is an ambitious project but we had a great team. Unfortunately even the best planning and intentions can be ruined by Coronavirus! One of our team members - Nick was stuck ill and out for a couple of weeks!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Whilst there is still loads we could do to build this out even further, we have created a fantastic product, which is in production and works end to end for both Children, Parents and Retailers. We are all incredibly proud of what we've achieved and believe this project could become a reality and help find unwanted toys a new home.
We are also really proud of the UI design. The whole team have worked their socks off but we were blown away by our UI designer Lennart, who has created something which children will really love to use and interact with.
What we learned
We learnt all about Algolia (API first search) and TalonOne (API first Loyalty engine). They are both fantastic products and embrace the MACH and out of the box mindset.
We used Commercetools in new ways we didn't think were possible to solve problems via the platform rather than writing huge amounts of custom code!
What's next for Toyken
Our MVP is just the start.
We really do believe in our idea and would love for it to be picked up by a large charity who can help us bring the project to reality.
Our MVP is a fantastic start but there is so much more Toyken can be. There are so many ways for children to interact, get involved with, and love the system. Lots of potential for children to earn and spend Toykens.
Built With
- algolia
- commercetools
- contentful
- nextjs
- react
- talonone

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