About Us

The Story

Christof and Steve met through mutual friends and started working together in April of 2018.

Those same friends had just had their first daughter Lottie. While having fun with Lottie and reminiscing about all of the forts, lava pits, cushion stacks, pillow fights, towers, and everything else creative kids can do with just a few cushions, we started talking about "the perfect couch fort couch."

We wanted something that could evoke the same feelings as those cardboard bricks from our childhood that you could use to build a wall taller than yourself and crash through it. Combine that with how fun creating your own fortress inside your home can be as a kid, and we thought we might be onto something. Building from your imagination fosters creativity and cognitive development in kids, and jumping, fighting, and crashing through cushions allows children to be active indoors. The contagious fun (trust us) pulls moms, dads, and other adults into the fray for invaluable family time.

We started looking for large foam block kits online and found that the only similar products were designed for commercial purchase. That made sense when we realized how much space it would take up in an average house to have numerous cubic feet of foam sitting around all the time. Though, what better place to store large scale toys could there be, we thought, than inside one of the largest traditionally unused spaces in a home?

Our work began and we set ourselves to making a set of foam blocks that could also be a comfortable furniture piece. Ever since, we've had visions of rooms covered with bright foam pillows becoming castles, caves, tunnels, mazes, crash pads, lava rocks, trampolines, walls, swords, dodge balls, foam pits, obstacle courses, and more. Then the mess is gone and a comfy couch or chair appears for bedtime stories or movie time.

If you share our excitement and want a few updates while we navigate finances and work our way toward finalizing a design, we'd love to keep you in the loop! Trust us, we hate spam as much as you, so we'll keep it to major updates now and then.

The People

 

Christof grew up in Warren PA and moved to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Mellon, graduating with a physics degree in 2008. Since then he's continued to live in Pittsburgh working as an EMT, then paramedic in Braddock; a Medical Specialist for a plasma donation center in Penn Hills; a landscaper in Sharpsburg, then a Development Vehicle Operator for two self driving car projects.

He spent the summer of 2019 at Denali National Park in Alaska hiking, backpacking, and exploring while working the front desk at a hostel. Currently, he's going to school for computer science and working remotely while having a great time with Steve trying to make KitCushions a reality.

 

 

 

Steve spent his early days in Irwin PA, with lots of climbing, jumping, building, and maybe a little bit of being a general menace to his neighborhood here and there. He moved up to Pittsburgh for a degree in Materials Science Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 2010. Since then he's worked in an excimer laser lab, as a research assistant 3D printing stem cell scaffolds, supervising the melt shop for an electric arc furnace, and as a metallurgical engineer in charge of product quality and testing lab operations.

He's traveled to a lot of interesting places in the world with his girlfriend Kelly, getting married in 2015 and continuing the tradition. They now spend many of their weekdays babysitting their niece Charlie (who we're sure you'll be seeing a lot of in photos). In 2018 he quit his job to pursue a few projects, out of which came a partnership with Christof and KitCushions.