Personalized Greeting Cards, Wedding Stationery & Branded Corporate Gifts
Personalized Greeting Cards, Wedding Stationery & Branded Corporate Gifts
This Christmas, we didn’t send a hamper. We sent 106 chess sets.
Every December, a UK company called Simwood sends its clients something to mark the season. Usually, that's a hamper — the classic tin of biscuits, the bottle of something nice, gone in a week. This year, they wanted it to last longer than that.
They'd been quietly supporting ChallengeAid, an organisation working in some of Nairobi's toughest neighbourhoods — places most programmes don't reach, including Mathare. Through ChallengeAid's Simwood School of Hope, students who started with almost nothing have gone on to university. Some have become national chess champions. Chess, it turns out, does something for a kid in a place like Mathare that's hard to measure but impossible to miss: it teaches patience in a world that rarely offers any, and it gives a child proof that thinking three moves ahead is a skill worth having.
Simwood wanted every school in the programme to have that chance. Not just the one class with the champion. All 53 schools. That meant 106 chess sets — and it meant finding someone in Nairobi they could trust to get it right.
No middlemen. Just craftsmanship.
That's where we came in.
Simwood was specific about what they didn't want: a container full of identical, mass-produced sets shipped in from somewhere else, chosen for being cheap and available rather than good. They wanted the money spent on this project to actually stay and matter in Kenya — sourced locally, made by local hands, chosen for quality that could survive years of real use by real kids, not just look nice unboxed.
That's the brief we took seriously. We didn't go with the first supplier who said yes. We went looking — comparing craftsmanship, finish, weight, durability — until we found chess sets we'd be proud to put our name next to. Every one of the 106 sets that left our hands and landed in a classroom in Mathare was chosen because it earned its place there.
It's a strange kind of pressure, sourcing something for kids you'll never meet, that you know is going to get picked up, dropped, argued over, and played on a concrete floor at break time for years. You don't source for a photo. You source for the tenth year, not the first day.
Simwood summed up the partnership simply: it was "such a pleasure to work with" us on it. Honestly, the feeling went both ways — it's rare to get a client who cares this much about getting it right, not just getting it done.
Why this one stuck with us
Most days, what we make at Pikseli is personal in a smaller way — a card for someone's birthday, an invitation to someone's wedding, something that says I thought about you specifically. This project asked us to bring that same care to something bigger and, honestly, more permanent. A birthday card gets read and kept in a drawer. A chess set gets handed down, class to class, for a decade.
We're proud of the part we played — not because we built anything with our own hands, but because we made sure that what reached those 53 schools was worth the trust that was put in us to find it.
Read Simwood's side of the story here: Where's My Christmas Hamper?