Hey — I’m Stephen Scaff. I’m a design-minded engineer from Pittsburgh, now living in the Pacific Northwest with my wife, Ligaya, and our three kids: Cillian, Finn, and Sylvie.

I’ve spent most of my career somewhere between design and engineering—building products, tools, systems, and teams. I’ve worked at Amazon, and today I lead a Design Technology team at eBay, helping modernize the historic internet brand. Working on products at that scale has taught me a bit about how things get designed, built, sold, and, sometimes, watered down along the way.

Nokotoko came from something much simpler: having kids and becoming a lot more opinionated about the stuff we bring into our home.

There’s an absurd amount of cheap, disposable junk made for children. At the same time, there are some incredible brands making thoughtful, beautifully designed things from good materials—products meant to be played with, lived with, handed down, and kept around.

Nokotoko is our attempt to make those things easier to find.

Everything here is selected because we think there’s something genuinely good about it: the design, the materials, the craft, the story behind it, or ideally all of the above. We hope it helps more families discover things they’ll actually love, while giving a little more attention to the people and companies making them.

This whole thing is still very much an experiment, so if you know a great brand, maker, product, or just have thoughts on what we’re building, hit us up. We’d genuinely love to hear from you.