Round tech start-up Kibu has secured an funding provide from entrepreneurs Peter Jones and Jenna Meek following a televised pitch on Dragons’ Den, placing repairable youngsters’s electronics firmly within the nationwide highlight.
The award-winning model, which produces modular, repairable headphones for youngsters, appeared on the long-running BBC programme represented by co-founder and chief govt Sam Beaney. Kibu’s pitch targeted on its mission to revamp youngsters’s shopper electronics round round rules, prioritising disassembly, restore and customisation over disposal.
Based by means of a collaboration between London-based design studio Morrama, superior manufacturing associate Batch.Works and Beaney, Kibu first launched by way of a profitable Kickstarter marketing campaign. Since then, the corporate has transitioned from prototype to scalable industrial product, positioning itself as a challenger model in a sector dominated by low-cost, disposable units.
Kibu’s headphones are constructed with modular parts that may be taken aside and reassembled by youngsters. Particular person components might be changed in minutes, extending product lifespan and lowering digital waste. The design additionally permits for aesthetic customisation, enabling customers to vary colors and replace parts as preferences evolve.
The model has already acquired worldwide recognition for innovation and sustainability, tapping into rising parental demand for sturdy, repairable merchandise in an period of heightened environmental consciousness.
Talking through the broadcast, Jones praised the idea and provided backing, citing his personal early expertise constructing and promoting computer systems as an adolescent. Meek additionally expressed curiosity in supporting the enterprise.
Beaney informed the Dragons that empowering youngsters to construct and restore their very own know-how shifts their relationship with possession and worth. “When a toddler builds one thing themselves, it adjustments how they really feel about it. Once they be taught they will repair what they’ve made, it adjustments how they see every part they personal,” he stated.
Jo Barnard, founder and inventive director of Morrama, described the model as a blueprint for futureproof electronics. By combining onshored manufacturing with agile provide chains, she argued, Kibu might unlock wider alternatives throughout youngsters’s shopper know-how.
Julien Vaissieres, chief govt of Batch.Works, stated the undertaking demonstrated how manufacturing might be structured to cut back waste whereas sustaining industrial viability. As each a founder and a mum or dad, he stated, the enchantment lay in giving youngsters company over the merchandise they use each day.
Now in its twenty third sequence, Dragons’ Den stays one of many UK’s most seen entrepreneurial platforms, attracting round three million viewers per episode on BBC One. For Kibu, the looks provides each capital and model recognition at a pivotal development stage.
With investor backing now on the desk, Kibu plans to scale distribution whereas persevering with to develop its round design ethos. The corporate believes its repair-first strategy might lengthen past headphones right into a broader vary of kids’s electronics, an business section more and more scrutinised for its environmental footprint.
As sustainability pressures intensify and right-to-repair laws beneficial properties momentum throughout international markets, Kibu’s mannequin might provide an early glimpse of how future shopper electronics for youngsters may very well be designed, manufactured and owned.
