A man who creates bespoke toys for sick and disabled children was left frustrated when an Amazon delivery of toy material was mistakenly thrown away, but it had surprising positive consequences.
Nick Hardman, 41, is a single father to two children, and for the last several years, has dedicated his life to creating special toys for kids with medical devices from his 3D Toy Shop.
From specialized toy shunts, foot splints, insulin pumps, tracheostomy tubes, dialysis machines and everything in between, Hardman has helped kids across the U.K. and beyond have a toy that looks just like them.
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"The most important thing for me is the children going through these scary procedures don't have to do it alone," Hardman told Newsweek. "They've got a friend just like them who understands the journey they've been on."
Last year, Hardman was set on creating a series of penguins fitted with pacemakers, to be distributed to hospitals across Europe. However, when Amazon delivered his lab-certified, toy-safe plastic, he was away on vacation and not home to accept it.
So, the delivery driver left it in a "safe place"—the trash bin outside Hardman's home. "And my helpful neighbor put my bin out. It was a rather unfortunate sequence of events," said Hardman, from Morley, West Yorkshire, northern England.
While the situation happened in 2023, the video Hardman shared at the time came up in his memories, and he posted it to TikTok on August 22 of this year, where it racked up over 1 million views.
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Shared to his account @3dtoyshop, in the video Hardman says sarcastically: "Thank you Amazon, for delivering my package to my bin. And thank you, Steve, for taking my bin out when on holiday."
Hardman said he immediately contacted Amazon, and the company refunded the package right away. And, because his video went viral, "it brought a lot of attention to the work that I'm doing.
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"People would see the video and click on the page, and if they had disabled kids, they would fill out the form and request a teddy," Hardman said.
A spokesperson for Amazon told Newsweek: "We have high standards for our delivery service partners and expect every parcel to be handled with care. We're pleased the customer did get his order, and we're delighted there's been a happy ending and he's now able to help even more children."
Hardman said that, because of the obscurity of his work, unless a person has a disabled child, they may not find his page, but the Amazon video changed things.
"Everyone's had a package go missing; everyone's got an opinion on it," Hardman said. "All those opinions, as people type them into the comments, tell the algorithm to push out the video to more people, so that's why I think it went viral."
"It really helped," Hardman said, adding that, since then, he has created over 1,000 pacemaker penguins.
Hardman set up his 3D Toy Shop during the pandemic, when he showed off the toys he had designed and created for his own children, to make some extra cash. "I had no thoughts or intentions to help disabled kids; it was just a toy shop that made toys that didn't exist," he said.
Hardman then got a request to make a teddy for a child who had been through "more brain surgeries than birthdays."
"I made and designed that as if it was for my own child," Hardman said, and it went viral, with hundreds more requests from parents of sick children quickly arriving. He has been "swamped" since.
In the United States alone, more than one in four adults have some type of disability that impacts cognition, mobility, independent living, self-care, hearing or vision, according to the CDC.
Hardman has since made over 7,000 toys, and has a team of helpers with him, thanks to donations from the likes of GoFundMe and Patreon.
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About the writer
Rachael O'Connor is a Newsweek Life & Trends reporter based in Leeds, U.K. Her focus is on reporting trends from ... Read more
