Lumiii
An Impact Story World for School-Aged Kids
Overview
Lumiii is an impact story world built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals, brought to life through video games, activity kits, and a comic universe designed for kids aged 6 to 18. The goal was to make the SDGs feel like an adventure, not a lesson.
I worked across brand strategy, IP development, go-to-market, and the Web3 launch. We won the World EdTech Startup Challenge, dropped NFTs on Solana, launched LumiiiToken on Polygon, and built a community of over 15,000 people from scratch.
Process
How We Built It
A Market Nobody Had Touched
130 million school-aged children were being asked to learn the UN Sustainable Development Goals through worksheets and dry classroom materials. 15% of school curricula worldwide now includes UN SDG topics, with projections pointing to 50% or more by 2030. And yet there was not a single game, show, or entertainment experience built around this framework anywhere in the market. That gap was the starting point for everything.
Education Disguised as Entertainment
The core bet behind Lumiii was that kids do not need to know they are learning. If the story is good enough, if the characters are funny and the stakes feel real, the SDG themes land on their own. Focus groups with school-aged gamers, parents, and teachers confirmed that story was the single biggest demand from young players, and the thing competitors consistently failed to deliver. So we built a full IP universe first and let the curriculum live inside it.
The Secret Order of Lumiiis
The Lumiii story world follows Baseer, Annie, and Lamb, three kids with superpowers who protect a town called Dingledum from the villain Zank and his forces, known as the Hollow. Every episode and every game arc ties to a specific UN SDG without being preachy about it. One story tackles Good Health and Well-Being. Another goes after Responsible Consumption. The tone sits somewhere between the action of Pokemon and the absurd comedy of Gravity Falls, which is intentional. Kids stay for the jokes. The values stick.
Games First, Subscriptions Second
The first products were Save the Dingles on Roblox targeting the US and EU market, and Lumiii Fantasy on WeChat for the Chinese market. Both are RPG-brawler games built at a fraction of the cost of traditional game development, with direct access to hundreds of millions of existing users on both platforms. Sitting alongside the games is the Lumiii Smart Block, a monthly subscription box that ships a toy, a mini STEAM activity kit, a magazine, trading cards, and digital collectibles. The physical and digital products feed each other.
Building the Lumiii Economy
We launched a collection of Lumiii NFTs on Solana and released LumiiiToken on Polygon, giving the community real ownership inside the Lumiii universe. The token and NFT drops were not gimmicks bolted onto the project. They were designed to reward the most engaged players and collectors and to fund ongoing development through community participation. From those launches we built a community of over 15,000 people across Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Discord, all organic.
Schools, Influencers, and Word of Mouth
The go-to-market strategy ran on four tracks at once: teacher advocacy through the UCL Edtech Labs partnership and direct school board outreach, influencer marketing with Roblox and WeChat micro-creators, community building on Discord and Telegram, and an affiliate programme that paid creators up to 30% net for referrals. By the time we entered the World EdTech Startup Challenge, we were already in advanced negotiations with six school districts representing over 200 schools and more than 80,000 students.
Results
Outcomes That Matter
Winning the World EdTech Startup Challenge, sponsored by Santander Universities, put Lumiii on the map globally. The NFT drop on Solana and LumiiiToken launch on Polygon gave the community real stakes in the universe. 15,000 people showed up organically, without paid acquisition, because the IP was worth showing up for.