After a turbo-successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, where it raised over $400,000 for the STEM Box educational product line, the Karlovac-based startup with a Zagreb address, CircuitMess, has recorded another success in its history, a collaboration with Kaufland, where the new version of the popular MAKERbuino gaming console – Nibble – will start being sold from today.
– Although we are constantly developing new ideas and products, we have not forgotten our first product with which we started. MAKERbuino has been entertaining children and adults eager for STEM knowledge around the world for years and is used in workshops from elementary schools to universities. Therefore, we decided to create a new and improved version of the MAKERbuino gaming console – Nibble. Kaufland Croatia has simultaneously expressed a great desire to offer Croatian customers a unique STEM set and decided to do this by including our gaming console Nibble in the offer of 33 selected Croatian stores – stated in a press release from the startup Albert Gajšak, who did not allow the pessimism during the pandemic to enter ‘his shop’.
We also spoke with him about the first collaboration of the startup with a supermarket and the largest single order to date, as they had previously only collaborated with smaller stores and webshops.
– We hope this is just the beginning and that it will grow into a long-term collaboration and open the way for us to other Kauflands in European countries such as Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Customers are quite interested, and I was positively surprised by how much effort Kaufland put into promoting our collaboration and posters. I hope we will include some other products in their offer for Christmas – Albert Gajšak told us.
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They have encountered some new challenges, scaling production, delivery procedures, but this, says Gajšak, served as a good introduction to the world of distributors for all future large collaborations. However, Kaufland, he adds, has exclusivity regarding the Nibble console, which is also the first localized product, all instructions have been translated into Croatian, which has not been the case so far as they focused on exports.
– The biggest software novelty is CircuitBlocks, our unique programming learning application that will show every ‘novice’ in a fun and simple way how to successfully program their own game for Nibble – say from CircuitMess, which this year moved from Karlovac to a new space in Zagreb’s Lučko.
The new console does everything that MAKERbuino did, only better and faster, they emphasize, and we learn that it features a color screen, a stronger processor, more memory, the ability to connect via WiFi, and the user experience of assembling and programming has been improved based on feedback collected over the past three years from a sample of over 2,000 customers. The set also includes tools, and by simplifying programming, the age limit for users has been reduced. Find the product specifications here.
The Croatian startup is quite influential, aiming to become one of the leading companies in STEM education that teaches young people about technology. According to Trustpilot, a Danish review site where consumers leave uncensored reviews, CircuitMess has a high rating of 4.7.
During the last conversation, Gajšak hinted that many interesting projects are being prepared in their creative workshop. The collaboration with Kaufland and the gaming console Nibble is just one of them. However, all this affects the continuous expansion of the team; for the latest delivery, they hired additional help, and they currently have three open positions for a WordPress & React developer, Embedded software developer, and user experience specialist.
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