KoloKidz offers alternative to staring at smartphones
Dollard-des-Ormeaux man’s business packages up box of activities for children
Louis McKenzie found himself facing a situation familiar to many parents, last year, when his daughter, Zoe, then almost 4, became increasingly interested in his iPhone.
“She was at the age where we started being more lenient toward the use of our phones,” he said, from his home in Dollarddes-Ormeaux. “Within a couple of weeks, we noticed our daughter was 100 per cent addicted to the phone. It was a wake-up call.”
It was also the beginning of a business idea for McKenzie and his pharmacist wife, who began brainstorming activities that could get their daughter and two-yearold son thinking and doing things as opposed to staring blankly at screens.
McKenzie has launched KoloKidz, a monthly activity box featuring crafts, games and toys for children ages three to six. Parents across Canada and the U.S. can order individual boxes online, in French or English, or sign up to receive them monthly. An initial batch of 40 boxes was shipped last week, and McKenzie is on standby to meet demand on the second monthly ship date, Aug. 20.
Each month’s activities gravitate around a theme. August is devoted to animals.
“In this first box, for instance, there’s a game where you have 24 tokens, with different animals on them,” McKenzie said. “The backs are separated into six colours, and you have a coloured die. You roll the dice, a colour comes up, and the kid has to take a token, imitate the animal on it and try to make the other person guess what it is.”
McKenzie is conscious that the three-to-six age range means there are various ways to engage with the games and activities, and he has factored that in.
“There’s another way of playing ” the token game, for example. “Initially, it was meant for younger kids,” he said, “but we’ve had eightyear-olds play with their siblings and have a lot of fun.
“The second way of playing is, instead of having all the tokens in front of the players, they each have six cards. They still roll the dice and have to guess, and if they guess they get a card; the first person to get all the cards wins. So there’s a competitive and more social aspect.”
Other elements included in this month’s box are a snake bracelet kids can makes themselves with beads and pipe cleaners; a game in which 16 animals have to be matched with four habitats; paper-bag puppets; and the monthly KoloMag magazine, including colouring, numbers and alphabet pages, and a story about a mouse and an elephant, complete with finger puppets and a comprehension quiz.
Future themes include space, water, nature and dinosaurs.
“I found I have a natural talent for figuring out cool ideas,” McKenzie said.
“When there are family parties and all the guys are sitting around talking finance, I’m usually the guy with the kids downstairs doing stupid stuff. Having kids changed me on a lot of levels. I enjoy spending time with them and doing all these things.”
McKenzie studied finance and operations management at HEC Montreal, then started a printing company with his cousin. He moved on to Sports Experts’ flagship location in Carrefour Laval, where he was general director overseeing the expansion of the store over a three-year period, before deciding to drop everything and start KoloKidz.
Though he has had lots of help — from his wife; daycare educator consultants; an illustrator; 12 beta-testers he uses to try out the activities; and a niece helping with social media — the startup for the moment is a one-man operation.
McKenzie financed the project himself. The low overhead allowed him leeway to avoid resorting to crowdfunding campaigns or outside backers. The biggest expense so far has been a laser cutter.
The bulk of the operation has involved McKenzie working late nights in his basement garage, where he even installed a mattress so he doesn’t have to disturb his family when he’s done for the day.
As he prepared recently to roll out his first batch of boxes, he was remarkably calm.
“I feel good,” he said. “If you had asked me a month ago, I was very nervous. Now I’m looking forward to getting feedback from everybody. I’m very confident about the product and looking forward to people talking about it and sending me pictures of their kids doing the activities. The boxes are all ready, so I’m not nervous.”