Tales that children can touch: the secret of the Faba storyteller

Matteo Fabbrini is 40 years old. And he knows what kids want. The storyteller named after the company he co-founded and of which he is CEO, Fairy, entered a hundred thousand homes in four years. And he captivated, with its sound talesthe little ones who live there.

The secret of the Treviso company, born from an offshoot of another big company like Maikii, is a series of small and colorful figurines. Characters who inhabit the imagination of children, often protagonists of successful cartoons or fairy tales. Each figurine contains a collection of sound tales. The audio is reproduced in a very simple way: just place the figurine on the small red and white speaker in correspondence with the Faba brand.

The first thing that strikes you about this storyteller, when he starts a story, or if he starts a song for children, is the audio quality: it’s a small speaker but it ‘pushes’ audio on three sides and excellently considering its size.

The second thing that impresses – and this is even more important – is ease of use: push the red button to turn on the case, a childproof operation, even if very small, and then place one of the characters that can be purchased separately on top of the cube. Lo and behold, the story – or the music – begins immediately. Because in the base of each figurine, which communicates with the speaker via Bluetooth, there is the information needed for Faba Box to play the corresponding audio.

And then, Magic: To stop the audio, and pause, there is no need to push a button. You simply move the character from the circle containing the word ‘Faba’. When you want to resume the story, just put it back on top of the box. This procedure, so physical, makes life easier for the child who is using the Faba Box. And it stimulates, in a profoundly digital age, an extremely physical relationship with the product. That goes way beyond parental expectations.

When I first turned on the Faba Box, my daughter – four and a half years old – she was enchanted by the possibility of making the characters ‘play’. Until then, he had only dealt with storytellers that involve limited interaction: that is, the choice of protagonists, or themes, via buttons.

The Faba figurines, on the other hand, embody the story. They are like vinyl for those who deeply love music, i.e. sound tracks that can somehow be touched, admired, and not just browsed on a touch display. And then they have another advantage: my daughter, after listening to their stories, started playing with them as she does with traditional puppets: she moved them on the carpet and used them to make stories all about her.

This double value of the Faba figurines I was struck, and somewhat mitigated the thought that – compared to the packs of stories sold by competitors – the Faba characters cost slightly more: they start from 12.90 euros, but go up to 14.90 euros for the protagonists of famous stories such as “The Gruffalò”, “Stick” and “The tales of Giulio Coniglio”.

While listening to a story ‘out’ from the figurine of “Caterpillar never sated”which contains the funny fairy tales written by Eric Carlemy daughter did another thing that struck me, and that strengthened my basic thought that – especially in the case of children – an object must never be too techy but it must preserve, indeed, a tangible magic. My daughter, I was saying, at one point she sat down and started drawing inspired by one of the stories: “The Bossy Ladybug”. The protagonists appeared on the sheet: a ladybug and aphids.

“Faba was born as a project within Maikii’s retail division, in which we developed and sold USB sticks in more than 100 countries with the 3D shape of some of the most famous entertainment characters” said Fabbrini during a interview.

The idea worked: an object of common use has gained a completely different appeal. Showing a USB flash drive suddenly made sense. It was no longer just a matter of transferring your data from one device to another.

And so, while many employees in the company became parents, Maikii moved towards products for children and with Faba set up an edutainment platform which, in the last quarter of 2022, generated a turnover of 1.4 million euros.