We love seeing my Gran. She lives in a care home in the Midlands, and when we visit, my children get to spend time with their great-gran. But when we visit, it can feel oddly stilted at times. The children find the surroundings a bit intimidating and look around for something to occupy them. Gran isn't massively sure where to pitch her questions, especially when my parents are there too. Three generations to deal with at once: I'd imagine it's quite tiring for her.
So we often take her the short walk to a lovely pub near her home, where she quite evidently works through the fish to get to the ice cream. Funny how sometimes in life there's a full circle back to childhood! But after the fuss of ordering, and with the background noise not helping, the conversation starts to dry up. It's no one's fault. It's just hard to keep going.
The quokka
To keep the children busy, we carry silicone colouring mats with animals on them and a pile of felt-tip pens. They're very much designed for small children, though I've often found myself doodling along, quite therapeutically. One lunch, in the summer of 2025, we realised we had a spare, so we put it in front of Gran.
Though it was slightly childish, but she picked up the nearest pen and started colouring the nearest animal: a quokka, from memory. Needing a lighter brown for its tummy, she asked my daughter to pass her the colour. My daughter passed it over, then started watching Gran's technique and asking her questions, forgetting the barrier she'd put up. My son, meanwhile, was furiously colouring his whole mat red, fully expressing his toddler self.
And suddenly, on our hands, we had three people playing and connecting, with a colouring mat bringing them together.
What we couldn't find
So we bought Gran some mats of her own. She found them infantile, and before long they became something for the great-grandchildren to use when they visited.
We went looking for something better and couldn't find it. Almost everything was made for children, was a memory game or a test of the mind, or simply wasn't made for older hands and eyes. Cards and jigsaws have been around for decades, but they were never designed for an older adult and a young child to enjoy together.
From a glass of wine to a company
Cat Paterson and I had talked for years about doing something in this space. Living in Singapore, a long way from our parents and grandparents, it was never far from our minds. We all have lots of ideas, and most of them come and then go. This one just stuck. It kept coming up over dinner and a glass of wine: does what we want exist? If not, could we make it, and what would it be?
When we decided to move back to Europe to be closer to family, it was the moment to stop talking and start building. We founded amāte in Portugal in Spring 2026.
I've spent my career moving between big companies (Tesco, M&S and Amazon) and smaller, mission-driven ones (Farmdrop and Sasha's Fine Foods). I've always enjoyed taking what big companies teach you about doing things at scale and using it somewhere smaller, with a mission. amāte lets me do both. Cat, my co-founder, leads our brand. She's VP of marketing at a global HR tech company, was previously head of marketing for Asia at Meta, and was named one of Ad Age's Women to Watch Europe in 2018.
Testing the hunch
Once we'd started the company, we went straight to the source. We bought a range of activity products online and sent them to Gran to try. It was challenging for her to use them, because they just weren't designed for her. A good intention that didn't land, and that was a learning in itself.
That's what we're designing around. Our kits are low- and non-digital: no apps, accounts or charging cables. When one arrives, I want Gran to get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment out of it, and be really confident about how easy it is to set up and start playing. That should work on her own, between meal times and activities, and when my family visits: we grab one or two kits, get them out and start playing all together, without it feeling like my kids are playing an adult game and my gran is playing a kid game. Something to do together, every visit.
Why now
Gran isn't getting any younger, and I didn't want to wait for a finished product. Our first prototypes are coming off the 3D printer now, and I've already sent her one of the first prints. Care homes start trying our prototypes in early December, ahead of our launch in the UK.
This is the first entry in my founder's notebook. Every couple of weeks I'll share what we're building and why: the decisions behind the kits, what testing teaches us, and the things we get wrong along the way.
What happens next depends partly on you
We're designing our first kits now, and the most useful thing you can do is tell us about your own visits. It takes about three minutes:
If you visit an older relative: take the survey (UK) · outside the UK
If you're 65 or over: take our survey for older adults
At the end of the survey you can join our founding list. Or join it here and I'll write to you, no more than twice a month, with what we're testing this winter, what we learn, and how families can try the first kits in 2027.