We recently sat down with Kidching Founder, Sarah Blair to discuss the origins of the app, her challenges and most rewarding moments and her hopes for the future of Kidching. Take a look at what she said below.
How did the idea for Kidching start?
The idea for Kidching came following a house move where we found ourselves faced with the sheer volume of kid’s toys, clothes, games and more we had accumulated over the years. We found so many good quality items with so much life left in them that wouldn’t be suitable, or sustainable, to throw them away.
We tried donating our items to charity shops but found that after Covid the shops were less willing to take as many items and we found it difficult to donate larger items to our local stores due to parking and access issues.
The next avenue we turned to was current second hand selling sites such as Vinted and eBay, but we found them busy, impersonal, overly complicated and full of commercial time wasters.
From this experience the idea for Kidching was born! We wanted to create a platform for parents to buy and sell their preloved goods that felt safe and easy to use. We also wanted to connect a community of likeminded people who have all been touched by the journey of parenthood and allow them to rehome their unwanted items in a way that supports charities, the planet and themselves.
When did Kidching launch and why did you choose to develop an app?
We started the business in January 2023 and after a period of research and development we officially launched the app in January 2025. We wanted the whole process to be as simple as possible for parents to use and felt that in order to do this we should make the platform app-based. We researched a number of smaller competitors selling preloved kid’s clothes and found that they were all website-based, it felt like more hassle to add items this way and so we decided to develop an app for the ultimate user experience.
Which parts of setting up Kidching have you found the most challenging and rewarding?
My background is in healthcare and so everything has been a fun but challenging learning curve, especially when building the app and bringing in third party integration to ensure the platform functions as it should. Knowing that we were coming into a marketplace with very established players we knew we needed the technology to execute and offer a service that felt more personal while making the process easy for parents who typically do not have a lot of free time! The most rewarding aspect of launching Kidching has definitely been giving parents the opportunity to buy affordable items for their children and create a revenue stream in hard economic conditions. We feel that the circular economy Kidching provides results in many positive outcomes, whether it’s making a little money, supporting charity, inspiring families to declutter their space or helping the environment.
What is your vision for the future of the business?
Our vision is to become the go-to app for families to buy and sell preloved kid’s items in the UK. Connecting likeminded parents, supporting charity, the environment and empowering the circular community with a human touch.
We are keen to develop a community-led platform for parents, so no selling of unrelated items, solely items for parents, sold by parents. We aspire to have a space where parents can come for advice, useful parenting tips and hacks as well as a bit of light-hearted entertainment. A crucial part of how we feel we can achieve this is by having a real person behind the platform and not a chatbot. This allows us to be more hands on and ensure our customer service is industry leading which we hope will differentiate ourselves from the ‘big players’ in this space.
We would love to create a platform for parents that mixes Mumsnet with Vinted, everything for parents all in one place.
If Kidching sounds like the platform for you, download the app today to be part of the community!
