About Us

Meet the Team

  • Zoe Cripps

    FOUNDER | ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

    Zoe is a AUB Visual Effects graduate who specialized in digital 3D sculpting. She’s experienced at creating both digital and traditional art. She’s a strong leader and is very ambitious in everything she does. She prides herself on her “can-do” attitude and is the reason we took the plunge on setting up the company.

  • Heidi Cripps

    DESIGN DIRECTOR | FOUNDER

    Heidi is our digital artist and designs a large number of our artworks and stickers. She also films and creates Tiktok videos of skateboarding and new products. Heidi loves her art and can churn out fantastic designs in very little time. She continues to surprise us with every piece she creates.

  • Sean Meagher

    COMMUNITY MANAGER

    Sean is our in-house nerd. He takes care of our social media accounts and all the backend tech issues. He’s also our personal model and skateboarder. He’s a hard worker and can sit for hours working on images or website management.

Welcome to Stubborn Toad, we are a UK-based company founded by two sisters in Reading who have a dream of beginning our own business creating art and bringing a little bit of fantasy into peoples lives. We both have a strong love for designing and being creative. We would love to share our creations worldwide. We love the concept of bringing colourful and unique art pieces to homes everywhere. Both of us love art and studied creative courses in college and university. We are confident in our ability to design art to a remarkably high standard. Not only that, but we enjoy it more than anything, so it never even feels like a job to us.

Our hopes are to create events and experiences surrounded by the theme of magic and fantasy. With the ever-growing fandom of D&D we hope to find likeminded adventurers that can appreciate our art and vision. We want to create a community to share our journey and have some fun. This is not just a business, we want it to be a safe space for people to be creative, make friends and enjoy a fantastical experience.

With the introduction of skateboarding in the Olympics and people taking up the sport during the multiple lockdowns happening around 2020-2022. We decided it would be amazing to begin creating our skateboard designs to sell to new and old skaters alike. You could even have one as a home art décor item to display on your wall. With Sean being a skateboarder, he has a strong understanding of skateboarding as a culture, and how to skate. This introduced us to the joy of skateboarding.

We noticed that there were a lot of skate websites that were out of skateboards around Christmas 2021. That was our sign that skateboarding is growing very fast and we could fulfil an increasing demand for skateboards. We can also touch on the niche of skateboards painted with specific designs. If you can dream it up, we can create it for you.

Thank you for taking the time to read about us and our business! We have big plans for our Stubborn Toad brand and cannot wait to share them with you when the time is right!