Meet the Member: Lunii

At the FACC-NY, we are proud to count over 1000 members and be growing every week and welcoming fresh new faces, like Maëlle Chassard- CEO and Co-Founder and Amélie Barral-US Country Manager at Lunii. Headquartered in France, Lunii is a fun, interactive, screenless device to foster children's imaginition. On top of their spectacular sales and team growth since their founding in 2016, Lunii has marked a milestone with their entrance into the coveted

MoMa Design Store. As the first two pioneers in the NYC office, Maëlle and Amélie reached out to the FACC and became members to benefit from targeted introductions to FACC members such as bilingual schools, learn about pop up stores, attend events and more. We asked the dynamic duo a few questions about their journey and what's next for the startup.  Be sure to extend a warm welcome to Maëlle and Amélie at upcoming events and don't hesitate to contact them through our member directory. What inspired you to create Lunii? M&A: The idea of Lunii came after writing a thesis about the imaginary. The main observation was that today, children's imagination is more and more restricted by an increasing amount of screens (phones, tablets, TVs...). Together with Lunii's 3 other founders, we wqnted to verify our studies and data by ourselves... and we decided to run a workshop in 3 different elementary school classes. The exercise was to draw an ogre. The children all drew Shrek or Hulk, which confirmed our observations. Lunii exists to allow children to imagine the ogre they want, their own world with their own imagination. What challenges did you face entering the U.S. Market, are they the same or similar in France? M&A: In France, while we were working on industrialization, we took the time to create a community: events, crowdfunding, meeting beta-testers...We are reproducing the same model in the US, meeting American families. The big challenge? We need to work much more quickly because the product already exists in English! Today, we are looking for both a strong partnership with a retailer who would have a crush on My Fabulous Storyteller and doing every B2C event we can because we want to build our community. For us, being close to them is the key: taking time to meet parents and children...Getting to know each other. In one word, how would you describe kids today? Sponges. In 5 years, where do you see Lunii's development? We have lots of projects! We want to create a strong, young and international brand. Our catalogue of audio content will be enriched with a dozen languages, and even more educational content, more and more innovative and original audio content, stimulating children and pre-teen's development. And there's more, we also want to be offering content for adults and seniors by then. We also want to manufacture My Fabulous Storyteller locally: in Europe for Europeans, in Asia for Asians and in the USA for Americans. Eventually, the big project is to offer new models of education. We are starting to work with schools to test our ideas and make them become realistic, impactful projects.