Entrepreneurs: Technology Will Save Us makes it all child’s play for today’s tech-savvy kids

It’s not surprising, given the cool, design-led focus of the brand. Koby was a director at brand consultancy Wolff Olins while Hirschmann created art installations for companies such as Nike. The founders, who met at Benetton’s Fabrica research centre in Treviso, Italy, had been holding demonstration workshops with children and parents in their spare time away from work. The first one they did was at the Kinetica Art Fair in Westminster.

“We had hundreds and hundreds of kids and parents there. You could see this amazing experience with a six-year-old sitting next to her dad and realising that her dad was actually good at stuff, and the parent being really excited that their kid has this amazing aptitude for tech, in a way that just playing with a phone you would never see,” says Koby, who was born in Los Angeles and worked in New York before moving to London.

One of the founders of Rough Trade heard about the demos and contacted the duo to say he loved what they were doing, and that it reminded him of the DIY ethos and creativity of the early punk and indie music movements.

The pair were given a small retail space at the front of Rough Trade East, the label’s flagship store which attracts thousands of music fans every week, and started selling their first toy kit, a small musical instrument made up of 15 components that made sound by reacting to interruptions to light-dependent resistors.

In the early days before the company was a full-time job, all its kits were assembled by hand around the couple’s kitchen table.

Koby had her first son, who is now four, and left her job in mid-2013 to work on the project full-time. She and Hirschmann moved into their first studio in Mare Street, and took on their first employee. A year later, they hired a sales manager and expanded to three products. They also moved to new premises, which included a workshop.

Since then, the kits have caught the imagination of mums and dads keen to help their youngsters tap into the burgeoning world of tech skills but unsure how to go about it.

“We see this as a real opportunity to demystify and make opportunities for kids and parents to really see this as something they can do themselves. Kids need to have skills around this. It’s fundamental to their success as they grow,” Koby says.

About 65% of their kits are bought for girls and the company is conscious of creating a gender-neutral business. “We don’t lead with gender,” she adds.

The group launched its seventh product this year, a design kit called The Mover, which started on crowdfunding site Kickstarter and now features in places like Selfridges. It will be stocked at John Lewis this Christmas, and the company plans to launch more products next year.

“We want to build a toy business for the creator generation, to put tech at the centre,” says Koby. “That’s a really different model for a really different generation.”