Taking home the TCT Consumer Product Application Award at the TCT Awards 2025, Kibu founder & CEO Sam Beaney talks to TCT about creating responsible products for the next generation of consumers.
According to the UK’s Recycle Your Electricals campaign, 103,000 tonnes of electricals are discarded annually. Just last year alone, almost half a billion small electrical ‘FastTech’ items – think cables, decorative lights, mini fans – were tossed away instead of being reused or recycled. These huge figures pose a major environmental threat and emphasise the need for a rethink around the value we place on our everyday consumer electronics.
Kibu, a London-based headphones brand, is on a mission to inspire such change onto a new generation of consumers.
A spin out of Batch.Works, another London-based manufacturing company which specialises in making products with sustainability at their core – using 3D printing – Kibu has been built on the principles of build, repair, and cycle.
Kibu, a line of children’s ‘build your own’ headphones, intends to be an alternative to the homogenous, low-quality headphones available on the market today, adorned with cartoon characters, and seemingly built to be thrown away.
“ It’s a commodity when it shouldn’t be,” Sam Beaney, founder and CEO at Kibu, told TCT.
With Kibu, that deep-rooted mindset is challenged from the get-go. Children can customise their headphones to suit their personality, and the product arrives in the post as a disassembled kit so that they can build, without fiddly wires or screws, and learn how every part comes together. The intent is to implore curiosity in how things are made and instil an emotional connection so that children will be encouraged to care for their products and normalise repair.
“If you’ve built the thing to begin with, like your IKEA chair, first you get an emotional attachment to that object, it’s your chair, you’ve built it, so hopefully you’re then incentivised to want to fix it, if you’re able to,” Beaney said. “We wanted it to be as easy to repair as it was to build in the first place.”
Kibu believes there is an appetite from parents who want to see more products that help their children to understand how things work. According to Beaney, that’s true of the kids themselves, too.
“It’s really encouraging,” Beaney said. “We’re seeing more and more feedback from parents and children – like this is the way products should be.”
The headphones were designed with Morrama, an industrial design consultancy that specialises in conscious products. Parts are printed using FDM and recycled bioplastic, which can be ground down and repurposed by Batch.Works into new headphones or other new products when they reach their end of life. The use of FDM is a conscious, economical choice. It has allowed Kibu to go to market at a starting price under £40, and while the telltale signs of FDM printing means the headphones don’t have that typical injection moulded finish, Beaney said Kibu is embracing the layer lines.
“It means we can sell them for a price that a consumer would pay,” Beaney said. “There’s no point making the most sustainable headphones that kids can build if it costs a ridiculous amount of money.”
Every pair of headphones is printed on demand from a fleet of six polymer printers in the UK, which can produce a pair of headphones every 25 minutes.
When an order comes in, the print job is added to the queue and filament is switched to the desired colour. According to Beaney there’s a huge amount of automation behind its digital workflow. Operators aren’t waiting around to take parts off build platforms when they finish and software plays a major role in the optimisation of its operations and quality of printing.
“The beauty of 3D printing is you swap CapEx with operations, so it becomes about time of setting up and getting good G-code and good printing,” Beaney said. “There’s no tooling and that just opens up so many doors. It means we can offer a level of customisability that isn’t feasible with injection moulding.”
The technology also gave Kibu the freedom to iterate and improve with feedback from customers. Beaney says he is constantly engaging with buyers to get their input and 3D printing allows responsiveness to that feedback in real time.
“We can be super adaptive,” Beaney explained. “So there’s less waste, there’s less stock sitting on shelves, and we’re really excited for what we’d like to be working on, and are working on more and more, which is trying to really leverage that idea that no print has to be the same. At the moment it’s colour but down the line, it may be things like texture, things like the part itself and we want to get the children, the consumer, more involved as well.”
Yet, 3D printing isn’t the headline here. Yes, Kibu wants children to be excited about design and manufacturing, but consumers are only interested in products that work – not necessarily how they’re made – and the company has gone to lengths to ensure Kibu headphones are not a lesser product or seen as a 3D printed novelty.
“Our development cycle in relation to customer experience cycle is so tight,” Beaney said. “So we can constantly be improving bit by bit, which I think compounds to making an amazing product. And that’s something you can only really get with a process like 3D printing.”
Kibu Initially launched on Kickstarter last April and was fully funded in under 24 hours. It recently launched its UK online store where customers can personalise their order with colours and custom engravings. According to Beaney, it’s just the beginning.
“ We want to be doing more and more products that basically meet those principles: build, prepare, recycle,” Beaney added. “We’re not going to ever work on a product that we don’t think we can firstly imbue those principles but also, where we can’t add a level of value in terms of making it a better product.”
This article originally appeared inside TCT Europe Edition Vol. 33 Issue 2. Subscribe here to receive your FREE print copy of TCT Magazine, delivered to your door six times a year.
