About Kiwi & Friends

How It All Started

It started with a name.

Sometime in the early 2000s, a childhood friend — Dr. Poe Phetthongsy — walked up and said: "I've got a great name for a children's character. Kiwi the Green Koala."

It stuck immediately. Something about the sound of it — the way "Kiwi" and "Koala" bounce off each other — felt like the beginning of something. So Kiwi's creator ran with it, and what started as a single quirky name grew into an entire universe.

Yes, we're aware. A koala named Kiwi. Koalas are Australian. Kiwis are — very specifically — a New Zealand thing. To our friends in Aotearoa and across the Tasman: we see you, we respect you, and we went ahead and did it anyway. The name was too good. Kiwi wanted it. The koala won. No passports were consulted.

New characters appeared one by one. Each one got a fruit name, an animal, a personality. A forest materialized around them — Wan Hundred Woods — warm, a little magical, and full of the kind of adventures that teach you something without making it feel like a lesson. Kiwi found a dozen friends. The friends found their stories.

"I basically invented the whole world from just one name."

That's still true. Every character, every story, every little speech bubble in the app traces back to one casual moment between two friends in Chicago.