Opinion: Our Experience with KiwiCrate.Com

Kiwi Crate has several brands, and mostly are separated by age, so throughout our time as their customers we tried several of their products. 

The first product we tried was Kiwi Crate. Our daughter was 7 years old and our son was 5 years old and, back then, they offered the Kiwi Crate box for two children in the same box. This later changed when they stopped producing boxes for more than one child, so if you wanted the activity for both kids, you needed to purchase two separate boxes. The second box came with a discount, but it had several disadvantages: it was still more expensive than before, it created more trash and, sometimes the kids ended up doing one and leaving the other one in half.

Soon we decided to only have one box for both of them. It took them a while to get used to working together, but eventually they were able to and they were fine.

Kiwi Crate is aimed at kids 5 to 8 years old, which made it perfect for my son. He needed help reading the instructions, but sister was quick to help with that. My son is also not very dexterous, so sometimes he got frustrated with some of the manual activities, but he still enjoyed it in the end.

We also tried Doodle Crate and Tinker Crate.

Doodle Crate is about art. Whatever they need to build ends in something artistic. Tinker Crate is about making machines. Here are the crafts they got when they received the Doodle Crate and Tinker Crate:

Doodle Crate, like Tinker Crate, are aimed at kids over 9 years old. My son is only seven now, so most of the time his participation is watching his sister do the work. He still learns and has a great time with the experience, and my daughter is great at being patient and explaining what she’s doing step by step. The only problem is that sometimes my daughter infers what she needs to do instead of reading what she needs to do, so she ends up breaking something or making some other part unusable. The crate is expensive, so we weren’t very happy with that. Even a 10 year old will use it better under parent supervision.

My brother has a 4 year old who has been getting the Koala Crate and she really enjoys it, too. It also provides a quality father-daughter time for their family.

Kiwi Crate in general is expensive, so what I did 6 months ago was prolong our remaining membership (you have the option of paying in advance, which is what we did), so for the past six months we’ve been getting one crate a month instead of 3 (Kiwi, Doodle and Tinker Crate).

Here’s how much it is in case you want to give it a try.

There are also free resources on their website, should you decide not to buy a subscription. There is a DIY section with a lot of project ideas to do at home. Last year I looked around for ideas to do during the summer. We didn’t really do any in the end, but some were really interesting and we will be looking here again for sure.

Have fun if you you decide to get this for your kids!

cheers!