Taking house the TCT Shopper Product Software Award on the TCT Awards 2025, Kibu founder & CEO Sam Beaney talks to TCT about creating accountable merchandise for the following era of shoppers.
In accordance to the UK’s Recycle Your Electricals marketing campaign, 103,000 tonnes of electricals are discarded yearly. Simply final yr alone, nearly half a billion small electrical ‘FastTech’ objects – suppose cables, ornamental lights, mini followers – had been tossed away as a substitute of being reused or recycled. These enormous figures pose a significant environmental menace and emphasise the necessity for a rethink across the worth we place on our on a regular basis shopper electronics.
Kibu, a London-based headphones model, is on a mission to encourage such change onto a brand new era of shoppers.
A spin out of Batch.Works, one other London-based manufacturing firm which specialises in making merchandise with sustainability at their core – utilizing 3D printing – Kibu has been constructed on the ideas of construct, restore, and cycle.
Kibu, a line of kids’s ‘construct your individual’ headphones, intends to be an alternate to the homogenous, low-quality headphones accessible in the marketplace right this moment, adorned with cartoon characters, and seemingly constructed to be thrown away.
“ It’s a commodity when it shouldn’t be,” Sam Beaney, founder and CEO at Kibu, instructed TCT.
With Kibu, that deep-rooted mindset is challenged from the get-go. Youngsters can customise their headphones to go well with their character, and the product arrives within the put up as a disassembled equipment in order that they can construct, with out fiddly wires or screws, and find out how each half comes collectively. The intent is to implore curiosity in how issues are made and instil an emotional connection in order that kids will probably be inspired to care for his or her merchandise and normalise restore.
“In the event you’ve constructed the factor to start with, like your IKEA chair, first you get an emotional attachment to that object, it’s your chair, you’ve constructed it, so hopefully you’re then incentivised to need to repair it, if you happen to’re in a position to,” Beaney stated. “We wished it to be as straightforward to restore because it was to construct within the first place.”
Kibu believes there may be an urge for food from mother and father who need to see extra merchandise that assist their kids to know how issues work. In response to Beaney, that’s true of the children themselves, too.
“It’s actually encouraging,” Beaney stated. “We’re seeing increasingly suggestions from mother and father and youngsters – like that is the best way merchandise must be.”
The headphones had been designed with Morrama, an industrial design consultancy that specialises in acutely aware merchandise. Components are printed utilizing FDM and recycled bioplastic, which could be floor down and repurposed by Batch.Works into new headphones or different new merchandise once they attain their finish of life. Using FDM is a acutely aware, economical alternative. It has allowed Kibu to go to market at a beginning worth below £40, and whereas the telltale indicators of FDM printing means the headphones don’t have that typical injection moulded end, Beaney stated Kibu is embracing the layer strains.
“It means we are able to promote them for a worth {that a} shopper would pay,” Beaney stated. “There’s no level making probably the most sustainable headphones that children can construct if it prices a ridiculous quantity of cash.”
Each pair of headphones is printed on demand from a fleet of six polymer printers within the UK, which may produce a pair of headphones each 25 minutes.
When an order is available in, the print job is added to the queue and filament is switched to the specified color. In response to Beaney there’s an enormous quantity of automation behind its digital workflow. Operators aren’t ready round to take components off construct platforms once they end and software program performs a significant position within the optimisation of its operations and high quality of printing.
“The fantastic thing about 3D printing is you swap CapEx with operations, so it turns into about time of setting up and getting good G-code and good printing,” Beaney stated. “There’s no tooling and that simply opens up so many doorways. It means we are able to supply a degree of customisability that isn’t possible with injection moulding.”
The know-how additionally gave Kibu the liberty to iterate and enhance with suggestions from clients. Beaney says he’s consistently partaking with consumers to get their enter and 3D printing permits responsiveness to that suggestions in actual time.
“We could be tremendous adaptive,” Beaney defined. “So there’s much less waste, there’s much less inventory sitting on cabinets, and we’re actually excited for what we’d like to be engaged on, and are engaged on increasingly, which is making an attempt to essentially leverage that concept that no print has to be the identical. In the mean time it’s color however down the road, it might be issues like texture, issues just like the half itself and we need to get the youngsters, the patron, extra concerned as properly.”
But, 3D printing isn’t the headline right here. Sure, Kibu needs kids to be excited about design and manufacturing, however shoppers are solely focused on merchandise that work – not essentially how they’re made – and the corporate has gone to lengths to make sure Kibu headphones will not be a lesser product or seen as a 3D printed novelty.
“Our improvement cycle in relation to buyer expertise cycle is so tight,” Beaney stated. “So we are able to consistently be bettering little by little, which I feel compounds to creating an incredible product. And that’s one thing you possibly can solely actually get with a course of like 3D printing.”
Kibu Initially launched on Kickstarter final April and was absolutely funded in below 24 hours. It just lately launched its UK on-line retailer the place clients can personalise their order with colors and customized engravings. In response to Beaney, it’s simply the start.
“ We need to be doing increasingly merchandise that principally meet these ideas: construct, put together, recycle,” Beaney added. “We’re not going to ever work on a product that we don’t suppose we are able to firstly imbue these ideas however additionally, the place we are able to’t add a degree of worth when it comes to making it a greater product.”
This text initially appeared inside TCT Europe Version Vol. 33 Situation 2. Subscribe right here to obtain your FREE print copy of TCT Journal, delivered to your door six instances a yr.
