Blair Lakis makes play dough in her home kitchen, with ingredients easily found in the pantry. She creates themed sets, like this mermaid kit.
Writer: Mary Boldinova
Photos: Aly Carrol
Every once in a while, parents’ favorite toys are also their kids’ favorite toys. Items that hold kids’ attention, spark imagination and don’t require a screen are like gold.
For Blair Lakis and thousands of her followers online, that item is play dough. As the founder and owner of Little Hands Dough Co., Lakis makes small-batch play dough kits out of her Des Moines home for a growing fan base of parents, gift givers and retailers.
Before homemade play dough was her business, it was an act of care. Lakis, a mother of three, is mindful of what goes into her kids’ hands. The brands on store shelves say their play dough is nontoxic but don’t disclose much beyond that. When she and the rest of the world suddenly found themselves with extra time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, she figured, “I can make this myself and I’ll know exactly what’s going in it.”
During lockdown, she experimented in her kitchen and surprised her kids with different themed play dough sets. Each kit paired custom-colored dough with themed accessories, from unicorns to dinosaurs and construction trucks, all organized within one portable case. After months of fine-tuning the recipe, she found her formula. It’s softer than the store-bought kind, lasts longer and is made from a short list of food-grade ingredients.
Little Hands Dough Co. kits come with homemade dough and a kaboodle of themed items to spark imaginative play.
For a few years, it was a seasonal hobby. She made themed kits for Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day and gave them to her own children and other kids in her life. That was until late 2023, when she posted a photo of her Christmas kit on Instagram and was hit with a wave of demand she didn’t see coming. “It honestly exploded,” she said.
Lakis is very clear she didn’t invent play dough kits; she simply brought the concept to Central Iowa. Turns out, a market was waiting. Within months, she quit her insurance job to run Little Hands Dough Co. full time. Her to-go jars, compact and easy to stow, are now sold in over 60 different retail stores, mostly in Iowa but stretching across the country.
“I like to think that my business is not just for kids,” she said. “It can be a tool that you can use to get something done. It can make certain aspects of motherhood, which can be so hard, easier.”
Lakis had no formal training to run a business, just a passion for her craft and connecting with people, and a knack for creating online content. She believes those skills are what shaped her success. Social media, she said, has been the engine. It’s how she’s reached so many people, and how she’s been able to speak directly to her audience: other moms.
That connection extends offline, too. Local customers often skip the retailers and simply swing by her house for a porch pickup. Lakis makes a point of showing up, too. Through the Downtown Farmers Market, the Waukee Area Chamber of Commerce, various pop-ups and other community events, she has found a network of mostly female small business owners she now calls friends. “It’s important to me on a deeper level than just selling my products,” she said. “We’re all kind of in this together.”
Everything is still produced out of her home kitchen — kosher-certified, insured and made in small batches she manages herself. She handles her own marketing, inventory and social media. But with demand growing and new products in the works, she knows something has to change. Scaling a homemade business is her next great experiment.
Lakis never foresaw any of it. For years she wondered, somewhere in the back of her mind, whether she was meant for something other than the insurance job she’d held for so long. Her advice to anyone still wondering: “It’s never too late.”
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