This Mother Turned Entrepreneur Started an Educational Toy

Founded by Priya Sharma, Bengaluru-based Learning Dino aims to ignite curiosity in children through activities and educational toys for children aged between two and six.

Priya Sharma had noticed how children are extremely curious and that basic educational activities are not helping with their curiosity. So, with a decade of experience in marketing and advertising, Priya began experimenting with some educational activities with her daughter.

Priya had almost finished her maternity leave and was fully ready to rejoin the workforce. But that is when her office asked her to prolong her leave. Her office was laying off people in the pandemic situation. Priya, who had no other choice, had to stay home. But she took this as a chance to start a business venture.

Because of Priya’s special activities, her daughter’s curiosity grew, and she was learning a lot. When Priya’s friends, who are also parents, found these activities useful, Priya started a Facebook page before formally starting Learning Dino (earlier known as Mummaworld) in January 2021.

Based in Bengaluru, Learning Dino designs learning materials for children and operates as an aggregator platform for educational toys for children between the ages of two to six years old.

However, this is not Priya’s first tryst with entrepreneurship. She had earlier founded Wish and You, a gift registry site where users can create wish lists by directly adding products from major e-commerce portals like Flipkart.

Learning Dino’s key products are the worksheets and activities designed by in-house teachers and graphic designers, including the initial products Priya designed that helped draw about 90,000 parents to its site. These include activity-based worksheets and stories that teach different topics like counting and color sorting. While these can be downloaded from the website for free, they are also made available for purchase in bundles due to popular demand from parents for direct purchase.

The start-up also serves as a marketplace for over 40 vendors, many of whom are mothers taking up entrepreneurship. The educational toys are strictly handpicked to ensure that they cater to specific skills like numbering, phonics concepts, and eye-hand coordination, among others. While the in-house products are priced between Rs 500 to Rs 1,000, other products sourced from third-party vendors – especially the Montessori products – can go up to Rs 10,000.

Priya is also prioritizing building a community of parents while nurturing the young brand. At present, she manages about 20 WhatsApp groups with a total of over 4,000 parents and about 5,300 parents on Facebook.

Started with an initial investment of Rs 1 lakh, Learning Dino is now seeing a monthly Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of Rs 1.5 lakh. To aspiring women entrepreneurs, Priya’s advice is – “It doesn’t matter if the idea is novel or not, if there is a market or not, if there is USP or not… if you are willing to learn and unlearn quickly, you will be successful even if the start-up doesn’t succeed. And it will empower you and the people around you.”

Credits: HerSrory

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-Staff Reporter