Enterprise

Sustainability: One SME’s inspiring journey

ciiru

Funkidz founder Ciiru Waweru-Waithaka during the interview at her factory in Kikuyu Town Kiambu County on February 12, 2020. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU

The saving grace, and the only reason a visitor is unlikely to miss the dirt road turn-off leading to the FunKidz factory is that there is a big church with a conspicuous green roof right next to it.

Located just outside Kikuyu town, a stone throw away from Highway 104, the factory crouches behind the brick wall of a fruit processor, itself an SME, just like FunKidz.

“We are an innovative children’s brand that uses technology,” the vivacious founder and CEO of FunKidz, Ciiru Waweru Waithaka, says of the business she started ten years ago and which is anchored in four pillars: Manufacturing, education, youth skills training and nutrition.

Should you show up at the gate unannounced, you are likely to find a donkey-pulled cart delivering water to the factory. This is because of the water challenges facing the neighbourhood. Regular and steady supply of electricity is not guaranteed either and the road to the factory is not in the best of shapes. But that does not faze Ciiru.

She will welcome you with a tin mug and a flask of hot water and invite you to try any of the six varieties of tea infusions that the factory offers its visitors.

“We do not do milk here,” she said when she welcomed me to her convertible office, which can play the role of show room, boardroom, or play area depending on who wants to use the space which has several short tables and wooden chairs painted in gay colours of varying shades. In fact, it looks more like a classroom than a CEO’s office.

Long before sustainability became a buzzword in Kenya, FunKidz was already living it. Like with many businesses, this was not the child of choice. When, in April 2019, the government announced a ban on logging in public forests, FunKidz found itself in the throes of disruption overnight.

Timber was and remains its primary raw material. For a long time, the company had depended on fresh wood from forests to make funky, fun and functional furniture for children.

Ciiru is a believer that children deserve dignity, both at home and in school. Yet, not all schools invest in furniture that can guarantee this dignity to children or to teachers for that matter.

The quest to answer these questions led Ciiru to found FunKidz. Before then, the interior architect used to run a company that designed residential, commercial and hospitality projects. “Is this a hobby?” she asks of her present businesses. “No!” she replies without hesitation. “How many children need furniture?”

When it was no longer possible for FunKidz to buy fresh wood due to the logging ban, Ciiru had to think on her feet to ensure her business remained sustainable.

She started reaching out to companies that import goods with a view to buying pallets from them. She has also been seeking partnerships with individuals, families and corporates willing donate their broken or disused furniture which FunKidz then convert into desks for schools.

When I visited the factory in February, I found a customer who wanted to buy such desks for a school in West Pokot. Apparently, the customer’s eight-year-old daughter had seen on TV that children in one West Pokot school were learning under a tree and sitting on stones. She told her mother that for her approaching birthday, she wanted desks she could donate to those children.

So, together they reached out to all the girl’s friends who were planning to buy her birthday presents and asked them to send cash instead. A few inquiries later, the mother learned that FunKidz makes furniture for children, so she made her way to the factory to place her order. Such desks cost Sh4,000 each.

In the course of her work, Ciiru has realised that there is more to sustainability than just manufacturing desks for children. She learned, for instance, that in many public schools, not all children have the right attire, say sweaters to keep them warm in the cold seasons. So, every time she has to deliver desks to such schools, she encourages parents to knit sweaters for their own children.

She has also been exploring partnerships to provide balanced diet meals and plans to launch the Funkidz Sustainable Farms for Schools and children centres soon. She says it is not enough to have a good desk and a nice sweater if the child is hungry.

Were such initiatives were to catch fire, they would have far-reaching implications on sustainable lives and livelihoods and offer hope for future generations.

Even in her learning journey, she continues to make one step every day, changing lives one piece of furniture at a time.

To make furniture, such as desks, doors, beds and tables, one needs wood of different sizes, whether one uses conventional timber or pallets.

In the initial stages, FunKidz would use conventional methods, such as gluing pieces together to get the sizes they needed. However, this method was not only cumbersome, it was also unsuitable for mass production.

When customers started ordering tens of pieces of the same item, Ciiru at first could not guarantee that they would all look the same. At some point, therefore, it became necessary for her to invest in technology that could solve such problems by creating large flat surfaces and which could then be worked on to produce Siamese replicas of the initial design.

“We started with basic tools,” Ciiru says. “However, four years ago, we bought new equipment.”

One of the new introductions was a flat bed printer. With this innovation, FunKidz can print any number of doors, windows, desks, tables or any other furniture. Because of its digital capabilities, it can print in full colour, meaning that if one were building a series of flats and she wanted all of them to have doors with the same floral patterns, they could get their wish. “It is not just carpentry,” says Ciiru, a partisan for precision.

“It is design. Everything made by man or machine has first to be designed.”

Because the factory has invested in a series of equipment meant to reduce wastage, it is possible for the workers to make pieces of timber that are exactly the size needed by a client, to the millimetre.

Interestingly, they hardly ever need to use nails because the technology makes joinery so much easier. According to Ciiru, however, technology alone is not enough to guarantee the sustainability of a business.

“We realised that what we needed most was people,” she says.

To ensure the factory gets the right people, prospective candidates are interviewed for a week. The question that makes or breaks the candidate is fairly simple; are you willing to learn?

Once the candidate passes the series of interviews, he or she has to be trained on how to harness the technology to satisfy customer needs. Although staff numbers fluctuate depending on the season, the company has 15 employees at any given time. It also hosts a varying number of youth trainees from time to time, sometimes absorbing the very best.

At the heart of FunKidz is the willingness to innovate. Due to the ban on logging, which disrupted the business considerably, and given that the supply of timber, even as waste from offices, industries, homes is neither regular nor guaranteed, the company has invested time, money and energy in coming up with an alternative material to wood using rice husks.

With the support of institutions like the National Environment Trust Fund (Netfund), the State corporation, the company has been working on different prototypes that test the suitability and durability of boards made from the husks.

Although it is still a work in progress, it has the potential to solve two problems: Create a green alternative to timber and create a solution for the sustainable disposal of rice husks.

“We are 50 percent sustainable,” says Ciiru, whose company now mostly uses recycled timber and only buys only a small proportion of fresh timber.

She challenges other SMEs to be innovative, believing that this will drive manufacturing in Kenya.

“Even in our smallness, we are able to achieve greatness,” she says, recalling the inspirational saying that the sun never forgets to shine on a village, no matter how small.