A desk mat for the work-from-home generation: Orbitkey looks to give home offices a boost
- Australian organisation specialists Orbitkey’s desk mat has a hideaway to store paperwork, a tool bar and a magnetic cable slider to stop wires falling
- It reached its Kickstarter funding goal in just a few hours, similar to its first product, an award-winning key-carrying device
Can a small strip of vegan leather change the way we work from home? That’s the hope of two entrepreneurs in Melbourne, Australia, who recently entered a rapidly growing market born out of the pandemic with their innovative new desk mat.
As Covid-19 took a hold of their city, Rex Kuo, who is Taiwanese, and Charles Ng, who is Indonesian, decided to postpone the launch of an in-office accessory which had been in the making for months at their company, Australian retailer Orbitkey, to switch to working on the new product.
“We thought, ‘Hey, we’re a young company, we’re able to pivot and work really quickly,’” Kuo says.
On July 14, they sought crowdfunding for a Kickstarter campaign. Not long after it went live, backers had pledged tens of thousands of Australian dollars toward it.
“Within the first few hours we received our funding goal of about A$20,000 [US$15,000],” Kuo says. In the time of a couple of weeks, 5,618 backers had pledged over A$500,000 to bring the campaign to life.
