There are quite a few products that are totally sold out these days because of COVID-19-related demand. When a Montreal business student couldn’t find a hot new gift for her child, she decided to team up with classmates and make it herself.
Diana Hourque, 30, is one of the creators of the Go Coconut play couch.
“It’s foam and fabric around it, but basically transforms couches into just entire worlds,” she said.
If you’ve ever made a pillow fort out of a couch, you can see why modular couches are so popular these days.
“It can be used as a castle. It can be a bridge. It can pretty much be anything. The whole goal for us is to enable kids to create and to build memories together with their families,” Hourque explained.
After getting pregnant with her son, Hourque wanted to get him all the coolest new stuff. She says she couldn’t find a modular couch anywhere.
“Because I couldn’t get one, I felt like, ‘You know what? Maybe there is a chance for us to build something here,'” she recounted.
She’s studying to get her MBA at Concordia University, so she teamed up with four fellow students and Go Coconut was born.
“We saw an opportunity and we said, ‘Let’s just jump for it,’ and we’re doing it. It’s amazing,” she said.
The couches are being manufactured just north of Montreal in Laval, with almost all Canadian materials.
“The only thing that is not is the fabric, but we are working on finding partners in Quebec, in Canada to be able to deliver a product that is 100 per cent Canadian,” she said.
It’s not actually made of coconut, they just liked the name.
“It’s something that was going to be durable on the outside, but soft on the inside,” Horque said.
She says demand has been high. The earliest you can get one is February.
“We just received an order from Yellowknife, which, to be honest, wasn’t something that we were expecting when we started,” she said.
Hourque loves watching kids learn to balance and build, and thinks parents will appreciate their own couches staying intact.
“It kind of replaces the kids taking your couches and destroying them in a way. They have their own couches to build stuff.”