Tonies, the German company behind the wildly popular screen-free audio player for kids, is launching its biggest product upgrade since its debut nearly a decade ago, the new Toniebox 2.
The new toy adds interactive features, sleep tools, and, for the first time, a screen-free gaming platform called Tonieplay, broadening the company’s appeal from toddlers to tweens.
From storytelling to interactive play
The original Toniebox, launched in 2016, created a new category of kid-friendly audio devices by letting children place figurines on the box to unlock songs and stories, and recorded more than 9.5 million boxes sold and over 125 million figurines shipped.
Toniebox 2 is designed to grow with kids aged 1 to 9+, with content and play tailored to age groups. It introduces a new Light Ring for visual feedback, upgraded durability, smarter sleep and wake features, and deeper parental controls.
But the biggest shift is Tonieplay, a proprietary, tactile game engine that lets children guide stories, play quizzes, and take on challenges without a screen. At launch, 12 Tonieplay titles will be available, blending audio storytelling with interactive gestures and glowing animations.
Targeting younger (and older) kids
For the first time, Tonies is targeting toddlers with My First Tonies, a line of soft, squeezable figures for kids as young as one. These introduce real-world sounds, simple songs, and vocabulary building, expanding the reach below traditional 3–7 age range.
At the other end, Tonieplay’s game-like experiences aim to keep older kids engaged longer, addressing one of the key challenges for toy-tech companies: customer retention as kids grow.
Toniebox 2 will be fully compatible with existing Tonies figurines, ensuring backward compatibility and reducing friction for families already in the ecosystem. Tonies says the upgrade is not just a hardware refresh, but a cornerstone of its growth strategy.
Founded in 2014 by two fathers in Germany, where every second child now owns a Toniebox, the company products are available in over 28 countries on 4 continents. Tonieboxes have already been activated in over 100 countries.
