Fuhu
| Private | |
| Industry | Consumer Products & Services |
| Fate | Bankrupted |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founders |
|
| Defunct | January 19, 2016 |
| Headquarters | El Segundo, California, United States |
|
Key people
|
Jim Mitchell (CEO) |
| Products |
|
| Revenue | $70 million (2014) |
Fuhu was a company that made the Nabi series of tablets.
Fuhu was founded in 2008 by Robb Fujioka and brothers Jim and Steve Hui. The company name was formed by taking the first two letters of the co-founders' last names. Jim Hui previous co-founded computer manufacturer eMachines, and his friends in the hardware business supplied the $1.5 million in seed money for Fuhu's startup.
John Hui advised Fujioka to stay away from hardware development, which had notoriously small profit margins, and only develop software to be licensed to run on other manufacturers' hardware. The company's early products included digital trading cards called urFooz, a software called urDrive that allowed devices to run applications directly from a USB drive, and Fooz Kids, a mobile device platform designed to give children ages 3 to 10 access to approximately 33,000 kid-friendly areas of the Internet while employing parental controls that prevent them from accessing more adult-oriented sites and services. The platform was praised by child safety advocates and "mommy bloggers".
In mid-2011, Foxconn, a major licensee for Fuhu software, asked Fujioka for ideas to unload a surplus of Foxconn's low-end tablets. Fujioka and Fuhu CEO Jim Mitchell experimented with loading the Fooz Kids platform on the tablets, but the setup proved too unstable to be marketable. Enamored of the concept, however, Fujioka and Mitchell ignored Hui's advice and purchased a higher quality, generic tablet on which they loaded the Fooz Kids platform as a prototype. They added a rubber bumper around the edges of the tablet to protect it from shock damage, which gave the device a butterfly-like appearance. They called the device "Nabi", the Korean word for "butterfly".
In anticipation of the upcoming holiday shopping season, Fuhu struck a deal with Toys "R" Us to be the exclusive distributor of the Nabi. The toy retailer placed an order for 10,000 units of the Nabi, which were delivered a week before Christmas and sold out in two weeks. After Toys "R" Us followed up with an order for only 15,000 units, decided to end the partnership in January 2012, by stopping production on the Nabi. Taking out a $10 million loan to continue operations, the company began designing the Nabi 2 for a launch ahead of the 2012 holiday season. Distributing through Walmart, Best Buy, and Target, Fuhu sold 750,000 units of the Nabi 2. The success of the Nabi 2 brought the company's sales to $117.9 million in 2012.
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