Est. 1991
Heritage & History
Thomas Murdough Jr. has a unique place in American toy industry history: he founded two of the country's major children's play equipment brands. After building Little Tikes — the Hudson, Ohio company famous for its chunky, rotomolded plastic toys and furniture — Murdough founded Step2 in 1991, again in northeastern Ohio, to compete in the same rotomolded children's product market he had helped create.
Step2 quickly established itself as a serious competitor in the preschool toy and outdoor play equipment category, developing a product line centered on play kitchens, water tables, ride-on toys, playhouses, and push cars. The brand's focus on rotational molding — a manufacturing process that produces hollow, seamless, thick-walled plastic parts particularly well suited to large children's products — gave Step2 the ability to design and produce durable play equipment at competitive price points. The company built its design and manufacturing capabilities in Streetsboro, Ohio, investing in the molds, presses, and assembly lines required to produce play equipment at scale for national retail distribution. Step2 grew to become the largest American manufacturer of preschool toys, a distinction that reflects both the scale of the Streetsboro operation and the long-term commitment to domestic production.
Made in Streetsboro, Ohio
Step2 designs and manufactures its play equipment and children's furniture at its facility in Streetsboro, Ohio, a city in Portage County in northeastern Ohio's manufacturing corridor. The Streetsboro plant is one of the largest rotational molding operations in the United States, with the capacity to produce the large plastic components required for playhouses, storage benches, water tables, and play kitchens that define Step2's product line.
Rotational molding is a manufacturing process particularly well matched to Step2's products: plastic resin is loaded into a mold, which is then heated and rotated simultaneously in two axes, causing the melted plastic to coat the interior of the mold evenly before cooling and hardening. The result is a seamless, hollow, thick-walled part without the seams or weak points associated with injection molded products — critical qualities for toys that will be climbed on, sat in, and played with aggressively by young children. The Streetsboro facility produces rotomolded components and assembles finished products under the same roof, allowing Step2 to control quality from raw resin to final packaged product. This level of vertical integration in American manufacturing has sustained Step2's position as the country's largest preschool toy manufacturer for more than three decades.
