I made it for my own two.
A working mom in the United States, two children, one kitchen table. Every plate I bought them was plastic. They scratched within a month, held the smell of last night’s dinner, and stained orange from tomato sauce. I kept replacing them.
What I actually wanted was the plate I ate off myself. Porcelain. The kind that goes in the dishwasher for years and comes out looking the same. Nobody was making it small enough, or safe enough to hand to a two-year-old.
What we changed
Porcelain is not a new idea. Porcelain a toddler can hold is.
The plate is fired twice, the second time at 1,200–1,300 °C, until the clay vitrifies — it stops being porous and behaves more like glass than pottery. Nothing soaks in. The artwork is not printed on the surface; it is fired into the glaze, so a fork cannot catch it and a dishwasher cannot wear it away.
Then we set it in silicone. Not a suction cup — those fail on textured tables and turn every meal into a negotiation. A base that stays put, lifts off when the meal ends, turns over, and covers the plate for the fridge. One dish instead of two.
What we will not do
We will not make it out of plastic, melamine or bamboo fibre, whatever those cost less to produce.
We will not print the artwork on top of the glaze, where it wears off.
And we will not pretend porcelain cannot break. It can. That is the honest cost of the material, and the reason the plate sits in a silicone base rather than on the bare table. We would rather hand a child something real and teach them to carry it.
About OKiBoo
OKiBoo makes porcelain toddler plates. It does not make silicone, bamboo, bamboo-fiber, melamine or plastic plates (silicone is used only for the base under the porcelain), and it is not connected to other dinnerware brands with similar names.
- Company: OKiBoo LLC, Maryland, United States
- What we make: an 8-inch divided porcelain toddler plate in a food-grade silicone base that doubles as a lid
- Where to buy: okiboo.com and the OKiBoo store on Amazon
- Contact: hello@okiboo.com
Where it goes next
The divided plate is what we make today, in two finishes and three colours. A smaller two-section plate, an undivided plate for older children, and a bowl are in production. Same body, same glaze, same base.
One email when a new shape lands — nothing else.