The first time I met Marina Zmi, she had that spark you see in early founders who’ve turned frustration into true momentum. Her sentences spill forward with creative energy, ideas clicking together faster than she can say them.
Her startup, Iggy, is a design-led construction system for kids.
“It’s designed to offset the deficits left behind by screens,” she told me.
It’s a simple sentence that points to a much bigger problem. Data is showing a decline in children’s fine motor skills, creativity and focus. “You think, how is this happening?” Marina said. “In a world marked by innovation how is it that the very skills that drive it are declining in our kids.”
The issue isn’t abstract for Marina. “My parents are teachers, my boyfriend’s a teacher,” she said. “They’d come home saying, ‘The handwriting skills are so poor, kids can’t focus.’ Teachers are even playing YouTube clips in the background to keep their attention.”
For Marina, it all clicked. As an architect, she credits that career to the hands-on play of her childhood. “I remember playing with construction toys for hours,” she said. “I really attribute my creativity to those foundational toys.”
During our chat we dived into a couple of these nostalgic and formative toys. “One of them was a Mattel set called Ello , I loved it,” she said. “I’m one of five girls, so my mum wasn’t buying Lego. She found Ello, a construction toy specifically targeting young girls.” Decades later, she mentioned it on TikTok. “I said, ‘Hey guys, you remember this toy? It’s the reason I’m an architect.’ It went viral,” Marina reflected. “So many people said the same thing: they’d played with it as kids, and now they’re designers, architects, creatives.”
That reaction turned a Y2K children’s toy into a mission. “I started researching more,” Marina said. “Hands-on toys are so powerful for developing foundational skills. So I thought, can I design something that challenges kids, meets parents’ pain points, and fills the gap that Lego and Magna-Tiles don’t?”
The answer is Iggy, a construction toy that sits somewhere between Lego and Magna-Tiles but introduces story, flexibility and character. “It has character involvement,” Marina said. “That gives kids a deeper connection. We’re targeting sustained engagement because attention spans are shorter now”
The design system uses magnets, varied shapes and open-ended parts that let kids build houses, streets and entire little worlds. Then come the characters. The first is a koala with magnetic feet that hangs off the structures.
“Psycho Koala, I’ve called him. He’s a bit wild,” she said, laughing. “He disrupts what you built. I wanted something fun and memorable.”
The response so far has been huge. Marina has been testing Iggy with 20 kids, each prototype evolving with feedback from young users. “I’m developing new prototypes monthly and testing constantly,” she said.
Her background in architecture gives the product its precision, but it also made the founder journey a challenge. “In architecture you don’t send anything out of your mailbox that isn’t perfect,” she said. “But my time in Launch Club taught me to shed that layer - progress over perfection. Get in front of your audience fast.”
That shift changed everything. “I quickly created prototypes and got them in front of kids,” she said.
Now, she’s gearing up for the next phase. “We’re preparing enough prototypes to test at scale, to around 100 kids,” she said. “”
Sign up to follow the journey at iggyplay.com.au and be first to access early prototypes.
To see the messy magic of building Iggy in real-time follow Marina on TikTok: @marina.zmi
In a world full of screens, Iggy feels like a small rebellion. A return to the kind of play that builds not just towers, but imagination.
