About

We didn't start a store. We started using something.

I'm a single mom with two kids. One of them is autistic — the kind where the feeling arrives ten minutes before the words do, and by then it's already a meltdown.

For two years I tried what everyone tries. Feelings charts on the fridge. A printed wheel taped to the wall. Flashcards that ended up at the bottom of a drawer. None of it survived contact with a real child, because a chart on a wall is too far away when someone is already at the bottom of it.

So I made one. A wheel we could put on the table between us — heavy enough to stay where we put it, big enough to read without leaning in. He pointed at it before he could say anything. That was the first useful thing we'd tried in two years.

That was not the end of it. We used it. Every day, for years. And using it is what changed it:

• The first version tipped over, so the base got wider and heavier.
• The words were too small from across a table, so they got bigger and the layout got simpler.
• Naming a feeling only solved half the problem, so we made the other side answer the second half: what can I do about it.
• The corners were sharp, so they got sanded round.

Every change came from living with it — not from a focus group, not from a supplier's sample book. Nothing here was designed to look good in a photo. It was designed to survive a Tuesday afternoon.

We gave them to friends. Then to friends of friends. Then therapists started asking where to buy them, and schools asked for a version they could hand out to a whole classroom. That's when it became a shop.

So here's the honest version of what we sell: the objects in our own house. The same wheel on our kitchen table. The same cards in my bag. We don't stock anything we haven't lived with first, and we don't ship a version we wouldn't hand to our own kid.

If something about yours doesn't work — a base that wobbles, a word that reads wrong, a size that doesn't fit your room — tell us. We've changed this product more times than I can count because someone told us the truth about it. We'll probably change it again.

— Founder, AINRVTEERS

A named feeling is a feeling you can work with.