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 subsequent technology of customers.
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 – assume cables, ornamental lights, mini followers – have been tossed away as a substitute of being reused or recycled. These large figures pose a serious environmental menace and emphasise the necessity for a rethink across the worth we place on our on a regular basis client electronics.
Kibu, a London-based headphones model, is on a mission to encourage such change onto a brand new technology of customers.
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 rules of construct, restore, and cycle.
Kibu, a line of youngsters’s ‘construct your individual’ headphones, intends to be another to the homogenous, low-quality headphones out there available on the market in the present day, 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, informed TCT.
With Kibu, that deep-rooted mindset is challenged from the get-go. Kids can customise their headphones to go well with their persona, and the product arrives within the submit as a disassembled package 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.
“If you happen to’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 wish to repair it, in case you’re in a position to,” Beaney mentioned. “We wished it to be as simple to restore because it was to construct within the first place.”
Kibu believes there may be an urge for food from dad and mom who wish to see extra merchandise that assist their kids to know how issues work. In keeping with Beaney, that’s true of the children themselves, too.
“It’s actually encouraging,” Beaney mentioned. “We’re seeing increasingly more suggestions from dad and mom and kids – like that is the best way merchandise ought to be.”
The headphones have been designed with Morrama, an industrial design consultancy that specialises in 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 aware, economical selection. It has allowed Kibu to go to market at a beginning value beneath £40, and whereas the telltale indicators of FDM printing means the headphones don’t have that typical injection moulded end, Beaney mentioned Kibu is embracing the layer traces.
“It means we will promote them for a value {that a} client would pay,” Beaney mentioned. “There’s no level making probably the most sustainable headphones that youngsters 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 might 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 keeping with 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 serious position within the optimisation of its operations and high quality of printing.
“The great 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 mentioned. “There’s no tooling and that simply opens up so many doorways. It means we will provide a degree of customisability that isn’t possible with injection moulding.”
The expertise additionally gave Kibu the liberty to iterate and enhance with suggestions from clients. Beaney says he’s continuously 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 more, which is making an attempt to actually leverage that concept that no print has to be the identical. In the intervening time it’s color however down the road, it might be issues like texture, issues just like the half itself and we wish to get the youngsters, the buyer, extra concerned as properly.”
But, 3D printing isn’t the headline right here. Sure, Kibu desires kids to be excited about design and manufacturing, however customers 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 should not a lesser product or seen as a 3D printed novelty.
“Our improvement cycle in relation to buyer expertise cycle is so tight,” Beaney mentioned. “So we will continuously be enhancing little by little, which I feel compounds to creating a tremendous 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 beneath 24 hours. It not too long ago launched its UK on-line retailer the place clients can personalise their order with colors and customized engravings. In keeping with Beaney, it’s simply the start.
“ We wish to be doing increasingly more merchandise that principally meet these rules: construct, put together, recycle,” Beaney added. “We’re not going to ever work on a product that we don’t assume we will firstly imbue these rules however additionally, the place we will’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 Problem 2. Subscribe right here to obtain your FREE print copy of TCT Journal, delivered to your door six occasions a yr.
