Miko Beautiful Child with stores in Eltham and Surrey Hills, Victoria, has been appointed as official TIKE resellers. With a commitment to support Australian designed and made products which are unique and of high quality Miko’s boutiques feature a beautiful collection of fine childrens clothing, furniture, toys and gifts.
Miko carry stock of a range of TIKE wooden bikes and accessories and join our list of exclusive upmarket TIKE stockists.

You can find Miko Beautiful Child stores at 980 Main Rd Eltham and 2/139 Union Rd Surrey Hills Victoria or for a complete list of Official TIKE Resellers please visit our webpage www.tike.com.au

In what is very exciting news for Live Play Create, the Australian based company behind the highly acclaimed TIKE Balance Bike, a new distribution agreement will shortly see the TIKE available for sale to the children of Taiwan.

The first shipments of the Australian developed TIKEs are already on their way from Melbourne to Taiwan and are scheduled to arrive just in time for Christmas.

Live Play Create founder, Paul Ballardin, said that this new distribution agreement in Taiwan was a great accomplishment for the company which is the market leader in Australia and New Zealand and was further recognition of the hard work that we continue to put into innovation, quality and working with selected high end retailers.

More details to follow.

Wooden bikes have a long history. The very first wooden bike is believed by many to have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci while the earliest useable and much copied velocipede was a German designed balance bike or running bike known as the laufmaschine from the 1800’s.

More recently wooden bikes have gained popularity in a number of formats from children’s balance bikes through to high end, and very expensive designs such as the stunning Revovo hardwood bikes.

Wooden Balance Bikes
In 1997 a German company called Kokua really pioneered the genre of wooden bikes known as balance bikes, run bikes or running bikes with their Like a Bike.

Since that time countless companies have copied the original well built and popular Like a Bike wooden bike design, predominantly with poor quality knock offs with little innovation that often leave children owners heartbroken and their parents disappointed.

(Try Google “poor quality balance bikes” “poor quality wood bikes” and “like a bike copies”)

One company that has developed its own unique and innovative take on wooden balance bike design is the Australian company Live Play Create with their TIKE.

The first balance bike was invented by German inventor Karl Drais in 1817 and was known as the velocipede which is the earliest known form of a two-wheeler without pedals.

More recently, wooden balance bikes have undergone somewhat of a renaissance which many attribute to the success of the German built Like a Bike (Europe) and the Australian designed TIKE.

Fundamental to explosion in popularity of balance bikes is, apart from their design beauty, the innovation of Like a Bike and TIKE in restricting the steering movement of the bike which results in a significant increase in their stability.

Of course this success has led to an explosion in new balance bike designs appearing almost daily which has led to a significant amount of confusions for parents in reconciling the differences between different makes and models.

The good news is that once you know what to look for, the differences are easy to spot and make it easy to compare balance bikes and choose the best balance bike for your child.