Spark Curiosity and Imagination In Your Child With Smartsters’ Thoughtfully Designed Furniture and Accessories

Mumbai: “Childhood is the most beautiful of all life’s seasons.” This quote throws light on one of the most dynamic, carefree phases of our lives that we all wish to go back to. Childhood doesn’t last forever, but everyone deserves one. And the starting point of our lives is our home—a place where we first learn how to talk, walk, run, play, observe, socialise, and ask questions. Children have a tenacity for curiosity, which, if nurtured in the right manner, can lead to their appropriate physical, mental, cognitive, and emotional development. It is this curiosity that keeps them on the lookout for magic. Remember the time when you’d play among the butterflies in your backyard, thinking that they were fairies? Remember how you’d cook an imaginary meal using your kitchen playset? All of these are instances of pretend play, which is defined as “symbolic play where children use objects, actions, or ideas to represent other objects, actions, or ideas using their imaginations to assign roles to inanimate objects or people.” And Smartsters is here to help children explore their passions without the constraints of stereotypes and social biases, encourage pretend play, which can help with problem-solving, boost language skills, and strengthen the imagination. Besides this, Smartsters seeks to aid discovery and curiosity amongst parents too, thereby helping them understand and parent their child better.

“At Smartsters, we create furniture and decor products designed for kids. Smartsters is a labor of love—the result of a deeply empathetic approach to childhood. Home is where our children spend the most time. And the design of children’s indoor spaces plays an important role in their overall development. When designed well, children’s furniture and decor can spark curiosity and imagination, enable concentration, help children channel their energies, and self-regulate their emotions. At Smartsters, our mission is to support the holistic development of children and equip homes for happy, free-thinking, wondrous childhoods!” says Bikram Mittra, Design Head at Smartsters.

“I realised there was a gap in the market for functional yet thoughtfully designed furniture in the kid’s segment that was well-priced. Our goal at Smartsters, therefore, is to serve parents and provide them with well-designed decor, furniture, furnishings, and bedding items under one roof through Smartsters so as to make their lives easier and provide their children with a healthy and playful environment to grow up in,” says Ashni Biyani, founder and director of Think9 Consumers, a co-creation platform that launched Smartsters.

Smartsters furniture has been designed with a deep understanding of the needs of growing children, from ages 3 onward, through the teenage years, and until they are fully grown adults. All of the products are brought to life with inputs from award-winning designers and child development experts who were pivotal in refining the initial ideas around the brand.

But, the best part? It is not just functionally designed; it is wonderfully aesthetic, using relevant and lively motifs, pictures, and sceneries that will stimulate yet soothe your child’s room. Smartsters has a large range of innovatively designed, child-safe products such as beds and bunks, study tables, storage units, tables, chairs, mattresses, bedsheets, comforters, cushions, lamps, and more. Most products, such as the Think Bunk Bed, climbing walls, slides, and inbuilt memory foam cushions, have been designed to encourage and enable motor development, deep muscle work, aerobic activity, and deep pressure touch in growing children. The design of indoor spaces, from study desks to storage units, can help with driving curiosity and concentration while inculcating in children qualities of empathy, grit, creativity, self-control, and lifelong learning. All of the brand’s efforts are aligned with this goal.

What makes the entire design process so unique is the fact that parents can speak to the brand’s design and consulting team for ideas and details on how to design better.

“Our design process is highly structured and is brought to life by our collaborative, cross-functional design innovation team. We start with a strong research process that starts with observing how children of different ages behave within their homes or everyday environments. This involves interviewing parents, interior designers, and child development experts. We then create a strong design scope to identify potential products that we can develop with a strong focus on innovation based on this research. This is followed by sketch-level design ideation. Often, we will have 20–30 ideas for each product. We will narrow it down to 3–4 ideas, which will go through a CAD engineering and prototyping phase. We will then take feedback from parents and children to study ergonomics as well as aesthetic acceptability. Finally, the selected design undergoes multiple rounds of design tweaking and testing to ensure that the final design meets our high technical standards,” says Bikram Mittra.

There are three design pillars that form the very foundation of Smartsters. The first pillar involves telling stories through their products; the second is based on strong design fundamentals such as perfect proportions and geometric flow; and the third is high ergonomics that are designed around a growing child, factoring in reach, height, as well as comfort. Besides this, Smartsters incorporates the required safety standards into each product; for example, all of their products have rounded edges to prevent injury.

It is clear that Smartsters recognises how precious and fleeting childhood is and is dedicated to enhancing the lives of children with its range of thoughtfully designed furniture and decor. Childhood is, after all, the most formative phase of one’s life, and Smartsters’ is surely leaving no stone unturned in turning this period into a magical one! Check out their range, and it is sure to have you dreaming (quite literally) of their children’s furniture and furnishings range.