CHRIS WIGGS – 1948-2024

Born in Hackney East London.

Did an Engineering apprenticeship at Hammond and Champness Lift makers.

Chris actually wanted to be a rock star and he played in a band but needed a proper job.

Worked as a design engineer at Torvac designing electron beam welders.

Took a career change in 1974, sold his house in Cambridge and became a student.

Attended Central School of Art and Design in London 1974 studying Industrial Design.

Graduated with First Class Honours in 1977.

He set up Christpher Wiggs Design in a premises he had bought in Battersea while still at college.

He got involved with manufacturing unique styled Japanese soaking bath tubs amongst other designs.

In 1980 he partnered with Chris Taylor whom he had met at Central.
They started Taylor Wiggs Industrial Design.

They also started Formech Limited, design, build and sales of manual vacuum forming machines.

Rather poetically one of the Formech machines is now used in the workshop at Central School!

They then formed Origin Products Limited making plastic briefcases, winning the Crucible of Creativity Award at the Birmingham Gift Fair in 1981 (Seriously!)

Realising that hourly paid work would not fund the indulgent lifestyle they had planned, they started inventing and licensing toys.

They were joined by Brian Whitehead, a Central School Alumni.

Early success in toys was by partnering with Tom Kremer at Seven Towns till the Mid 1980s, licensing The Orb by Waddington’s and Parker Brothers which Origin helped manufacture in the Uk and Rubiks Clock which Chris designed and Manta Force with Bluebird.

They worked closely with Larry Mass originally at Art Taylor’s office in New York, then Larry started Seven Towns in the US.

The Orb was launched in 1983 and now bought back by Hasbro as Atomix 40 years later!

Origin then licensed a number of products to Bluebird and Peter Pan Playthings, developing some of the first products to be digitised by pantograph from pattern accurate models made by the skilled gnomes and elves at Origin. Hard to believe there was no internet and no 3D printing.

The first was Manta Force that ran for six years, then Zero Hour, Oh Penny and most famously of all Polly Pocket.

Chris made the first compact with clothes peg on the back and with a tiny one piece carved wooden doll inside for his daughter Kate after being given a huge metal badge by Dave Berko at Amtoy during a Toy fair in New York, the label read Cute as a Button.

Kate played with it for years then during a clear out gave it back to Chris.
It was shown to Torquil Norman at Bluebird who asked if the doll could articulate at the waist, which Brian swiftly prototyped.

Chris drew a series of interlocking compacts, and the concept was licensed to Bluebird then on to Mattel and Bandai.

It became the go to birthday party gift and is still loved by children the world over. Polly Pocket then influenced an enormous range of Licensed Miniature toys from Bluebird such as Disney’s Tiny Collection, Marvel, Batman, etc.

Chris probably designed and drew at least a thousand toys in his career, he was prolific, a wonderful artist and illustrator, a very good modelmaker and a fine engineer.

With an experienced team at Origin, who later went on to form the toy inventing company Fuse, Chris was able to spend more time indulging his musical roots and he built a full music studio at home and even became the manager and roadie for his son Ben’s band.

Chris also designed a unique hybrid Motorcycle come scooter and researched manufacturing it in the UK. In fact, many of today’s motorcycles look very like the concept Chris pioneered.

Chris bought a plot of land in Berkhamsted and build a unique home, with an enormous workshop and recording studio, a workshop with rooms as it was known.

Origin was sold to Mattel in 2007 and Chris then travelled the world, much of it on his bicycle before deciding to live in Eze in the South if France where he had a full workshop and a recording studio in the building.

Chris’s music lives at Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/h1hbc5a1Lg2h8YmP7

Chris is survived by his wife Carolyn, children Kate and Ben and 5 grandchildren.

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