Pikkii and WITH Creative Director Ste Smith talks gifts, games, toys… And his creative process

Ste! I’m shocked we haven’t chatted with you properly before. For the uninitiated, who are you?
I’m Ste Smith, founder of the design agency WITH Creative and the award-winning gift-and-games brand Pikkii. People often assume ‘Ste’ is some exotic Scandi name – sadly not. I grew up in London where there were too many Stevens to count. Ste was my version… It stuck. Beyond that, I’m basically a big kid with an overactive imagination who never quite grew out of asking, “What if?”

Perfect. And you’ve mentioned before that – growing up – you were obsessed with how things were made. Tell me a little about that.
Ha! Yes, I used to take lots of things apart and then try and put them together again. Sometimes I’d be able to do that successfully… Sometimes less so! As a kid, I grew up quite poor, so the toys I got, I cherished. One year, I got a Super Soaker. I remember vividly – mid water fight – hiding behind a car. I looked down at this thing and thought, “It was someone’s job to create this…”

Wow! Do you know how old you would’ve been when that happened?
Hmmm… Maybe seven or eight. I was completely hooked on how things were made. I remember visiting the secondary school open day at 11 years old and seeing them demo the vacuum-forming machines. It was love at first sight! At school, I thrived in art and design – anything creative. After studying design for A-Levels, I applied to Central Saint Martins because it was the place to be for creatives. At my interview they asked, “Where else have you applied?” I said, “Nowhere. I’m coming here.” I didn’t really want a plan B.

Not arrogantly? Just truthfully: “This is where I’m going!”
Exactly. Thankfully, they liked my work and let me in! After graduating in Product Design, I quickly discovered that being a new product designer doesn’t pay very well. I should’ve looked into that, really. You had to work for free to get experience. So my best mate and I decided to do our own thing. I taught myself to build a website and we started posting our product ideas online. One of those ideas was a mug with a knuckle-duster shaped handle.

Believe it or not, I remember it!
Yes, that turned out to be a hit product. It went viral – crashed our website. We had thousands of emails from people wanting to buy one. We didn’t even have stock – it was just a sample that we slip-cast ourselves, but the internet went wild for it. Once sites like Gizmodo picked it up, we agreed that we needed to get this made. These days, it’s quite easy to find a factory and get stuff made… It really wasn’t that straightforward back then, but we managed. We ended up selling a couple-of-hundred thousand of them. It was our crash course in going from idea to reality.

Another early idea, which was actually one of my uni projects, involved used seatbelt buckles from old cars. I’d go around scrapyards cutting them out of cars destined for the crusher, trying to figure out how to turn them into cool products that were functional and desirable. The best one was the BuckleUp Key Holder, a wall-mounted buckle you click your car keys into, then press the button to release them. People loved it. We sold it for over a decade, then licensed it to a German distributor. It’s still selling today. Not bad for a scrapyard idea.

I love that! It sounds like you somewhat fell into gifts then… But it’s clearly your milieu!
Pretty much. I’ve been making gifts for people for as long as I can remember – anything from handmade cards to slightly questionable inventions. Seeing how much joy a thoughtful, creative gift could spark got me hooked early on. The gift world moves fast. You’re juggling ideas, design, packaging, price points and tight deadlines all at once. It’s chaos… But the good kind. Perfect if your brain refuses to sit still. We don’t just design gifts, though… We design playful products in lots of categories. In the past couple of years, we’ve been designing lots of games and toys, which is basically the same thing, just with even more excuses to play at work.

Let’s talk about that! You’ve licensed some lovely toys…
Thank you! One that we’ve recently licensed to Melissa & Doug was what we called Pooping Poochie. They call it Feed, Walk and Poop Pup. It’s a wooden dog; you feed it these little wooden treats… Then, as you’re pulling it along, it occasionally does a poo. It’s got quite a clever mechanism. One side of each piece you put in its mouth shows food. These get flipped inside so that they come out with the poo-side facing upwards! My daughter LOVES it!

What else can I show you? Oh! This is a wooden puzzle; there’s a T-Rex, a shark and a whale in the range. When you put it together, mount it to this base and press the button, it comes alive! By which I mean it lights up, starts to walk or swim; jaws opening. It’s pretty great; we licensed that to Blue Marble under the National Geographic brand. We have more in development launching 2026 – one in particular that I’m very excited about… It’s going to bring joy to so many kids!

Really cute. I like the breadth of your ideas, Ste. If I asked you where your ideas come from, would you have an answer for that?
They come from everywhere and anywhere! I think some people are always creatively switched on and looking… And I feel I’ve always been there. When I go into a shop, I’ll be looking at how things are packaged, why they’re selling, why someone’s picking something up, why an item is the size that it is, or that particular colour… Why is it on the market? So I’m always looking at gaps and opportunities and trying to look at things through a different lens. I must write down at least ten ideas a day.

Ten ideas a day? With 3,650 ideas a year, give or take, some of those have got to be good – just statistically! Ha!
Exactly. And what I think is great about the setup is that we can have ideas for any category. That can be a kitchenware item, or a hardware item, a toy, a game, an innovation in packaging. No matter what we create, we can usually find a home for it. This is why I think the world of licensing ideas is incredible… You can make your idea a reality with different kinds of expert; people that have the right distribution, sales and marketing… You can just plug into that.

In terms of sorting the wheat from the chaff, then, how do you know which of your thousands of ideas are any good?
Hmmm. That’s a good question. A few times a month, I go through them all like an over-caffeinated curator. Then I’ll talk with the team about what we think has the most potential, and where they might fit. Of course, a lot of them don’t go anywhere unless we get a brief, but I record everything in a system where they’re all tagged for future reference. So if ever we get a brief for a product in lighting, say, we can just search ‘lighting’ and all of those lighting ideas come up.

I’m always fascinated by how people store their ideas. Are you making analogue notes or are they going into your phone?
They all go into our online project management system. I’ve lost too many actual notebooks! Ha! To keep things in the front of my mind, though, we do tag ideas that we think are special and review them often. Also, if there’s something really special that we want to think about, we write a physical note, do a doodle, or make a quick mockup, or 3D print it, then put it on the desk to look at. So there is an analogue part to it. We’ve got shelves and shelves of things in various stages of development in the studio… It’s important to have them there in the subconscious mind.

Great answer, thank you. I’m enjoying this enormously! When we spoke earlier, you said that you try and “place ideas” when you’re going through them. What did you mean by that?
If we’re designing with a certain client in mind, they’ll always get first review and refusal. If we’re creating blue-sky ideas, the first question is: Where would this have the biggest chances of success – who would do the best job with it? For example, with the wooden dog, we knew we didn’t want plastic, so the natural fit was Melissa & Doug.

It’s about finding the perfect home for every idea rather than forcing it into the wrong box. When designing for Pikkii, we treat it like we’re designing for any other client and ask questions like, “Is it right for the brand? Do we have the right manufacturers? Is it right for our existing retailers?” If not, we look at brands that already live in that space.

I like that you don’t seem to let any ideas fall through the cracks. Now, when last we met, we were on your stand at Top Drawer. You showed me one of your big successes, The Egg Game…
Ah yes, The Egg Game! 100 fun challenges to complete without dropping the egg. Before you draw a challenge card you can decide to play safe and use the bouncy rubber egg for one point, or up the ante and use a real egg for three. First to a dozen points wins. It’s got really bold graphics, simple artwork and has the bouncy egg sticking out of the front of the box.

Yes, I’ve got a feeling that was very deliberate! It’s almost irresistible!
It was very deliberate! We had many packaging designs, some with the egg sticking out of the top, some with it sticking out of the side… But sticking out of the front made the most sense. It’s the top-selling game for quite a few of our customers. And this year we’ve launched the festive spin-off – The Brussel Sprout Game. Same chaos, but Christmassy… And everyone loves that little plush sprout! This has proved to be far more popular than expected – we already did two additional production runs, but it’s completely sold out – which is great and frustrating in equal measure. Ha!

Ha! You’d been reluctant to do festive lines until your team persuaded you to launch that one – and two others. What were they?
One of them is called Festive Fun to Hang on Your Tree. This is a neat, unique format that, surprisingly, nobody’s done before… Festive trivia questions and festive charades packed inside baubles so you can hang them on your tree. You just grab them off the tree, play some games and hang them back up. After Christmas, you can pack them up with the rest of your decorations and they’re ready to go again next year!

That’s such a great idea, Ste! I love it. The simplicity and practicality of it. And all these are internal items, right?
Yes, we invent and design all of the products – we have no inventor items at Pikkii. We license lots of products out through WITH Creative, and have so many ideas in the back catalogue already that we’ve decided not to look at inventor items… Which sounds ridiculous, as I know that there are so many incredible concepts out there!

I don’t think that sounds ridiculous at all! Your system’s working very well for you. Alrighty… We need to wrap this up but, just before we do… What’s the one question I could’ve asked you today but didn’t?
Oh, that’s a tough one. I might need to ponder that. You know, one thing does come to mind… You could’ve asked me, “What’s the one toy product you wish you’d created?”

Oh, that’s a great question! You know what? I should end all my Mojo interviews with that! Ha! And what’s the answer?
Bunch O Balloons! As a kid, I spent hours filling water balloons one by one. Whoever cracked that problem deserves all the praise – and probably a yacht.

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