Artist Statement
Long before Grimm’s Toys became a world of its own, Taylor Alexandria Hayden was shaped by stories. As a child, she was drawn to fairy tales — the kind passed down and read aloud, filled with forests, animals, and magic. With her German and Irish roots, these stories felt less like fiction and more like inheritance. Growing up in Texas, she spent her time writing, sewing, and making things by hand, often imagining objects as characters with lives of their own. Her father, an avid gardener and believer in reuse, taught her to see beauty in what had already lived a life — worn tools, old fabrics, and overlooked things with stories still inside them. That way of seeing became the foundation of her creative work.
Years later, while living in New York and studying American literature at 'The New School' University, those childhood stories and values resurfaced in an unexpected way. In 2018, Taylor came across a box of worn and discarded stuffed animals headed for the trash. Instead of turning away, she brought them home. She washed them, restuffed them, and stitched them back together. What began as an act of sustainability became something deeper — a desire to create characters from reclaimed materials, each carrying a past and ready for a new chapter. Grimm’s Toys grew from that moment, rooted in the belief that what has been used, loved, or forgotten can still hold wonder.