Founder Sam Beaney shares the origin story of Kibu, a children’s headphone company emphasising sustainability through its innovative build, repair and recycle model that’s designed and manufactured so kids can put the sets together themselves. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I'm Tom Edwards.
Sam Beaney is the founder and CEO of Kiboo, a children's headphone company that emphasizes sustainability through its innovative build, repair and recycle model.
Designed and manufactured so kids can put the sets together themselves.
The headphones are made from bio based materials that can be recycled or composted at the end of their life and come with a built in Kibu safety engine to allow children to enjoy sound safely no matter what device you plug them into.
So how do you make a profit with such a durable and easy to repair product?
And what's the testing process like to ensure we're taking care of all those little ears?
Well, here is Sam with more on how the journey began.
Kiboo is a children's headphones company and the whole premise of it is this idea of build, repair, recycle that children's products currently aren't very good for the environment at all.
They're ultimately designed to eventually go to landfill, whether they break at some point during the use or the kids outgrow the product.
Kibu is all about redefining how children's products could be.
So we have these three tenets of build, repair, recycle.
So this idea that children can build their headphones in our case so they understand how it works, the parts that go into it, they have an emotional attachment to the headphones, which then means when it comes to things like repair, they want to repair it.
So they're designed to be as easy to repair as they are to build in the first place.
No screws, no glue, no fiddly wires, and then recycle.
I mean, you can only do so much repair and eventually the children may not want to use the headphones anymore, they might outgrow it.
So what happens at the end of its Life?
So we 3D print them using a material called PLA, which is a bio based material, so it doesn't use any petrochemicals.
And it means that at the end of its life we can recycle that material into new filament because we 3D print them.