Why We Started Making Toys (A Personal Story)

My daughter Mila turned six in March. My son Dima is three and a half. I mention this because Boxiki Kids exists largely because of them — and because of a rainy Saturday in January that changed how I think about children's products.

The Rainy Saturday

We were stuck inside. Vancouver rain, the kind that's not heavy but somehow soaks through everything. Mila was bored with her toys. Dima was in that toddler state where everything is either fascinating or enraging with no in-between. I went to the shelf of toys and books and realized: most of them were junk. Bright and loud, yes. Engaging for more than ten minutes? Rarely. Educational in any meaningful way? Barely.

I'd spent the last two years obsessing over product quality for strangers, and here I was, surrounded by mediocre products for my own kids. The irony was not lost on me.

Sound Books: The Idea

Dima loved books with buttons — the kind that play animal sounds or music. But every one we owned had at least one button that stopped working within a month, or sound quality so bad that the "cow" sounded like a broken car horn. Elena and I had a running joke about one particularly awful book where the "cat" meow sounded more like a tiny scream.

What if we made a sound book that actually worked? Clear sounds, durable buttons, content that was genuinely educational rather than just noisy?

I brought the idea to the team on Monday. Rizwan's first response: "I don't know anything about kids." Victoria's first response: "I know everything about kids." (She has three nieces and is the family's unofficial gift buyer.) Between the two of them, we had a perfect balance of fresh perspective and lived experience.

Testing With Real Kids

We ordered prototypes from three different manufacturers. Then we did something that no amount of lab testing can replace: we gave them to children.

Mila, our six-year-old focus group of one, was brutally honest. She pressed every button, flipped every page, and delivered her verdict in about forty-five seconds: "This one's boring. This one's weird. This one's good." Market research, toddler-style.

Dima, meanwhile, was more interested in whether the book could survive being dropped, thrown, and briefly chewed. (It could. We made sure of that.)

Victoria brought prototypes to her sister's house and turned the living room into a testing lab. Five kids, ages two to seven, forty-five minutes of chaos. The notes she came back with were more useful than any focus group I've ever commissioned: "The farm animal book was the favorite. The alphabet one was too slow — kids got impatient between letters. The music book needs a volume control or parents will lose their minds."

Volume Control

That last note became a mission. We insisted on a volume control. Our manufacturer said it would add cost. We said we didn't care. Because I've been the parent at 6 AM whose toddler found the sound book and pressed "trumpet" at full volume. Nobody needs that.

Boxiki Kids Launches

Our first Boxiki Kids products — three sound books — launched in April. Watching reviews come in from other parents felt different from our kitchen and travel products. More personal. A dad in Ohio wrote: "My daughter carries this book everywhere. It's the first toy she reaches for in the morning."

I read that review to Mila. She nodded approvingly. "Good," she said. "That one deserved it." High praise from our toughest critic.

— Stan