Rotationally moulded playground equipment fuels the imagination

Playforce is a market-leading UK based company that design and sell playground equipment to nursery and primary schools. They came to Corilla Plastics for help with a brilliant product called Poddely.

Poddely, like many of the best ideas is both simple and clever at the same time. A lot of playground equipment is designed with a specific outcome for how children interact with it and what they learn. But Poddely turns that on its head by providing a range of blocks, shapes, connectors and chutes that children can arrange however they wish, stretching their imaginations and giving much more opportunity for interaction, problem solving and team work.

So with such a great product, why did Playforce seek out Corilla?

When Playforce launched Poddely, they were buying in solid polyurethane cubes and prisms, which were expensive, heavy and risked making a great product too expensive. After researching alternative manufacturing methods, Playforce approached Corilla to manufacture the rotationally moulded playground equipment needed to solve their problem.

Our design team worked with Playforce to finalise the requirements for the components of the Poddely set, before producing CNC milled tools capable of delivering the fine level of definition and the complex shape required.

With the tools manufactured, we rotationally moulded the components using a particularly soft grade of material to make them as safe as possible for handling by children. Thanks to our foam filling capability we also injected each of the blocks with a soft foam keeping weight down but ensuring there was sufficient stability for the products to maintain their shape, enabling them to perform as required.

Joel Thomson, Supply Chain Manager for Playforce is delighted with the outcome, “Corilla provided us with the ideal solution to the issue we were facing. They worked with us throughout the process to really understand the product, what it would be put through and how durable it needed to be. We are really pleased with the end result, which is more than a match for the original components we were buying in, not to mention that it has dramatically reduced the cost of production.”