Gubbachhi

Most educational toys available to Indian parents teach the alphabet, numbers, shapes, and colours — skills that any toy can cover. What's genuinely hard to find is a toy that introduces a five-year-old to Warli painting, or lets them build the Taj Mahal out of wooden blocks, or piece together the Ramayana as a puzzle. Gubbachhi, founded in Bengaluru in 2023 by Abhijith and Pallavi Shetty — both parents of young children — was built around exactly that absence.

The name means sparrow in Kannada: a bird that's playful and curious, and distinctly Indian. The toys follow the same logic — wooden puzzles of Indian monuments (Red Fort, Gateway of India, Lotus Temple), art form puzzles in Warli, Madhubani, and Kalighat styles, stamp art kits, rangoli puzzles, family peg dolls, and storytelling blocks. Everything is made from natural materials with local artisans — hand-painted, hand-cut, hand-sculpted. All products meet CE (European) and ASTM (American) toy safety standards: no harmful additives, no sharp edges, no small parts that are choking hazards.

The brand raised pre-seed funding in 2025 led by D2C Insider Super Angels — backed by Anupam Mittal, Kunal Bahl, and founders of The Souled Store — which for an early-stage toy brand is a meaningful signal. The full range on PureStora covers toddlers through primary school age, with products specifically designed around developmental stages: stimulation for younger children, open-ended imaginative play and cultural learning for older ones.

For parents who want their child to grow up knowing what Kalighat art looks like before they encounter it in a museum, or who find most "educational" toys indistinguishable from each other — this is the more interesting shelf.