Colorforms

Harry and Patricia Kislevitz invented Colorforms — reusable vinyl cling shapes that adhere to a smooth board — after experimenting with vinyl floor tiles. The concept was immediately licensed to character properties, creating an entirely new category of open-ended imaginative play. Colorforms sets for Barbie, Disney, and TV characters were hugely popular from the 1950s onward.

Harry and Patricia Kislevitz, art students in Brooklyn who discovered by accident that thin vinyl sheet clings to a smooth laminated surface without adhesive.

The Kislevitzes had been experimenting with vinyl offcuts, sticking cut shapes to the enamelled bathroom wall of their apartment and finding they could be repositioned indefinitely. The commercial insight was to sell the principle rather than a picture: a laminated board and a sheet of die-cut vinyl shapes, and a child who could dress a figure, build a face or compose a scene and then take it apart and do it again.

The first sets were abstract shapes aimed at creative play, and design-conscious retailers took them seriously as an art toy. What made Colorforms a household name was licensing — from the late 1950s onward, sets appeared for essentially every major American children's character, from Popeye and Casper to Barbie, the Muppets, Star Wars and Sesame Street, so the catalogue reads as a decade-by-decade index of children's media.

The company remained independent for decades and the product has been in continuous production since 1951, which makes it one of the longest-running toy concepts in America and one of very few invented by accident on a bathroom wall.