About Us
It all began in 2019...
Hi! My name is Rui (Ray) Zhou and our journey with QuKidz began in 2019. I wanted to develop products that would create a connection to both my inner child as well as a bond with my own children. Why did we start with water bottles? Well, the truth is that I have a background in selling water bottles and it just seemed like a logical place to start.
So what does QuKidz stand for? "Curious Kids". We want to capture both the innocence of childhood along with the sense of discovery, wonder and the desire to explore and play with the natural world that all kids intuitively have. We design products SOLELY for kids, with close attention paid to not only making the products fun, but also hygienic and, most importantly of all, safe for kids to use.
Design ideas
We worked with a US-based design agency to get the initial concepts out, and then...revisions. LOTS of revisions. Some ideas were really fun, but, unfortunately, logistically impossible. In the end we settled on a blend of kid-friendly designs combined with unique elements of "fun" to continue the tooling process.
This back and forth took about a year from getting initial concept to finalizing engineering design, and then it was time to find a factory to go into the quotation and molding processes; a tall task during COVID!
Getting the details right
The molding process was...a nightmare to say the least as it was very difficult to get the details correct. Did you know that a unicorn and a pig are actually very similar? A little bit of change to the eyes and a the placement of the nostrils can change a cute little unicorn into a cute little pig. These were the issues we had to wrestle with to make sure the characters ended up as we had envisioned them from the beginning. In addition, we went through many tweaks to finalize on the color of the Luna Unicorn and Buddy Puppy.
Finally, by the end of 2024 we were in a position to start serial production of the products, and our journey could FINALLY begin.
The journey ahead
So where to next? Well, we are going to stay in water bottles in the beginning and slowly expand into different form factors and materials within hydration.
Assuming that this all goes according to plan, we will look at expanding into adjacent categories such as snack containers, lunch boxes, etc...all the while maintaining true to our initial vision:
Products designed ONLY for kids with features nodding to their unique needs while always keeping an element of fun.