A London based kid’s toy subscription platform, Whirli raised £4 million seed funding on 15th December 2020. The round was led by VC Octopus Ventures, in which MMC Ventures also participated.
With the newly received investment Whirli is planning to scale their customer offering. They will also invest in their proprietary technology.
According to the company’s research, “The parents spend approximately £300 an year on the children’s toys, yet around 60% of the toys at people’s home are not even played with. With the unwanted gifts together the toys clutter over the homes and mostly and up in a garbage landfill.”
Whirli brings a solution to this problem by its subscription platform where the consumers pay monthly and get Whirli tokens of £8. These tokens can be used for borrowing toys from the catalogue provided by the startup. And when a toy is not used for playing anymore it can be exchanged to get another one. If a toy is at a particular home for 8 months it can stay there forever without paying any extra cost. People also have the option to buy toys and free the tokens they have earlier. The token allowance depends on the plan parents opt for, and only tokens are given back for swapping. The subscription plans of the company start with £9.99 and the highest plan is for £29.99, these provide between 80 to 240 tokens. The toys listed over the website are mostly under 20 tokens for borrowing.
An early stage Venture Partner at Octopus Ventures, Rebecca Hunt said, “The toy market is quite big but it still remains stuck in the dark times of e-commerce and offline marketing. We believe that there is a good opportunity for a new company like Whirli to start with a new approach.”
The company uses a technology based platform which presently tracks around 50,000 toys which are circulated between several households.
About Whirli
Headquartered in London England, Whirli was founded in 2018 by Nigel Phan. The sharing subscription service provides parents and their kids to exercise a big shareable box of toys at a fixed monthly plan. Parents can pick the toys they want and the company delivers the same at their homes. They can send back the toy when they are done with them and can exchange for another one. When a toy is sent to a new household, it is inspected and sterilized at the company’s facilities.
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