Upon reflection, 2021 probably was not the best time to be starting up a company which relies on international shipping! We tried to manufacture Hippo Mat™ in the UK, however it’s simply too expensive. For the quality a Hippo Mat™ has (high quality materials including microfibre velvet, non-slip backing, precision printing, embroidered stitch edging, high quality cotton label) would have cost £50 just to manufacture! This would mean it’d have to be sold for upwards of £100 to be a feasable business, which just wasn’t happening…

This meant that, for the time being at least, Hippo Mat™ has to be made abroad. Which means we’re at the whims of the shipping woes caused by a combination of container shortage issues/COVID-19, and a UK lorry driver shortage. Due to it being our first year, we had no idea of how to anticipate just quite the delays we ended up experiencing. To put it into context, we ordered 1000 mats in March 2021. Usually, this would have arrived in 1-2 months, maximum. However this order did not arrive fully until November – nearly 9 months! Most of that time was spent either on a ship in the ocean, or stuck in a warehouse somewhere.

Moving forward, we feel we are better equipped to understand and predict potential delays along the line so that these things don’t happen in the future.

Please let me take this opportunity one more time to thank you for being so patient and understanding when waiting for your order to arrive – a lot of you actually placed the pre-order back in January! I’ve spoken to many of you either by e-mail, on social media, or on the phone which has been great in itself to get to connect with so many lovely people across the country.

Hippo Mat™ was only born in January this year after selling the Brighton Hippo Mat™ through my driving school page in 2020. What a year 2021 has been, and as everyone’s did, included many ups and downs. From nurturing and crafting 11 new designs (with the public’s help) all the way to completion Back in April, to losing many hours of sleep over a seemingly never-ending shipping delay, something pretty cool is hopefully being born out if it.

At the time of this Hippo News, we’re currently our 2nd logo and have begun introducing our latest logo and mascot, Reg the Hippo, who’ll be fully taking over  in 2022. Hopefully Reg will be up to the task, what do you reckon?

Our goal is to continue to spread education of local areas across the country in this fun car play mat form. The addition of Reg will hopefully add more fun and make the act of learning even more natural and hidden within play.

There’s a lot planned for 2022 including 35 (YES, THIRTY-FIVE) new locations, a whole host of new illustrations and characters, different types of new Hippo Mat™ products, and a lot more spreading positivity into local communities. It’ll be exciting, and with Reg’s help we plan on revolutionising the classic car play mat.

Thank you for sticking around for at least this part of the Hippo Mat™ journey, hopefully you’ll stick around for the next chapter!