Startups like Magic Crate, Flintobox, Itsy Bitsy, Themeefy are creating craft kits to keep children's hands busy

Make cars from cardboard, learn to paint giraffes... startups are creating craft kits to keep children's hands busy. Frustrated by the lack of quality toys and activities for children in the Indian market, these entrepreneurs are stepping in to provide alternatives and wean children off devices.

Going through Indian toy store shelves can be frustrating for any discerning parent, likely as they are to be met with rows upon rows of Barbie dolls, fake Chinese Barbie dolls, a variety of remote controlled cars, and Indian board games and craft kits with tacky illustrations, spelling errors and unintelligible instructions - possibly the reason bestselling board games in India continue to be 50-year-old classics such as Monopoly, Pictionary and Scrabble. At the end of the day, it is back to the iPad for most kids and parents, who let children play on phones and tablets despite misgivings about increased screen time. But increasingly, entrepreneurs across the country are stepping in to fill this obvious gap in the market.

"Parents are tired of buying the same kind of toys over and over - a red car this time, a blue car the next. And toy stores, in our opinion, are the worst places to buy toys. The educational aisle is even more upsetting, filled with battery-operated toys. For a product to be an effective learning tool, the child has to be able to use it to make inquiries and attempt to answer them. You can't have the machine asking all the questions," says Viswanathan Ramakrishnan, founder of Magic Crate, a manufacturer and retailer of activity kits aimed at children between 4 and 8 years of age on a monthly subscription model. Its products are designed by a team of early childhood experts and toy and game designers led by Anindita Sengupta, an alumnus of NID, Ahmedabad.

Magic Crate focuses on creating theme-based activity kits priced between Rs 650 and Rs 800 a month. The company is angel-funded by Srikanth Iyer, ex-CEO of Pear son Education and currently CEO of HomeLane.

Chennai-based Flintobox, one of the early operators in this segment, works on a similar model. Founded by friends Vijaybabu Gandhi, Arunprasad Durairaj and Shreenidhi SP in September 2013, they devoted an entire year to product development. The company now ships around 5,000 boxes a month to kids in the 3-7 age group and is looking at clocking 20,000 boxes a month in a year's time.

"We wanted to offer creatively challenging and non-digital ways for kids to spend their time. It is well-established that 80% of brain development happens before the age of eight," says Durairaj.The activities fall under `create, play, explore and story-telling' categories and cover cognitive, motor, coordination, emotional and vocabulary skills.

Almost 40% of Flintobox's sales is from tier-2 and 3 locations like Tirupur, Meghalaya and Daman & Diu. Flinto also seems to have cracked the logistics puzzle, using India Post to reach areas where private logistic partners cannot deliver.

The company raised seed funding of $300,000 with angel network GSF leading the round in October 2014. "We are looking at an early-learning market of almost $2.2 billion, which consists of 4,000 towns and cities with almost 80% remaining untapped. In addition, the early-learning concept is also catching up with Indian parents," says Durairaj.

According to Magic Crate's Viswanathan, India has roughly 55 million children in the age group of 3-10 years."Combined with increased internet penetration, this is easily a $3-4 billion opportunity in India. The pain points are not specific to India and there is a large international market out there as well," he says. It's not just about learning. Unable to find quality craft products in India, Kunjal Nirwani, a graphic designer, began to toy with the idea of starting something.

Along with her husband, Dhirender, a former IBM India country leader, she started CraftGully, an online store with around 2,000 craft products aimed at children and adults. Nirwani estimates that the DIY market in India is around $5 billion. An initial investment of Rs 50 lakh has seen the Goa-based startup scale its operations rapidly, and has supplied products not just to remote areas such as Mizoram, Nagaland, Andaman and Nicobar Islands but also to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and The Netherlands.

Bengaluru-based couple Rashmi and Harish Closepet, however, believe in the offline experience over the online one when it comes to buying creative materials. The founders of a chain of craft supplies store, Itsy Bitsy, they have seen their business expand from a 400sqft store in a south Bengaluru neighbourhood to 15 stores across India with two new ones coming up in Goa and Pune."One of our main objectives was to provide employment to underprivileged women, and more than 1,500 rural women earn a living making our products," says Rashmi Harish.

Unlike many of its competitors, Itsy Bitsy is focused on brick and mortar stores because the founders believe the touch-and-feel factor is important when it comes to weaning children away from screens and getting them to work with their hands. "Since quality craft products are relatively uncommon in India, we conduct workshops at our stores to familiarize users. While we do have a robust online store, 90% of our sales are through the brick-and-mortar stores," she adds.

Aggregators are also taking advantage of increased activity to create awareness about intelligent, hands-on options for children. Bengaluru-based Themeefy.com is focused on capturing and showcasing the outdoor creative aspects of a child, as it believes that 70% of a child's learning happens outside the classroom.

"We have come up with an app that allows parents, teachers and teenagers to build digital portfolios. The app, Momentbox, lets you capture audio, video, image or text and in a few taps it sends it to your child's portfolio. It also helps you find activities suited to the child's strengths and interests" says Titash Neogi, CEO of Themeefy. "Children are doing so much today that can't be represented or understood via grades. If we don't give importance to creativity, we won't be able to help our kids get ready for the future."