Our Story

I am CK Tan and, along with my 16 year-old daughter Yannie Tan, have set out to invent STiKidotz™ by putting two ideas together to solve a single problem.

I am an IT professional who runs my own company specializing in video and graphic technology. I have been in the business field for over 20 years. Yannie describes herself as a fervent and curious experimenter for design technology and products. As a young inventor, her design classes have inspired not only me, but many people to generate more innovative and enhanced solutions for our product.

I have always had a passion for 8 bit graphics and pixel art since I designed my first pixel art program in high school. When I turned 50, I found myself reflecting on my life and looking back at my young adulthood with nostalgia. I made the decision to follow up on the passion I had started 30 years earlier. I started playing around with the idea of creating a hands-on pixel art toy. Always fascinated with 3D art and pixel graphics, I wanted to find a creative, innovative and fun way to make a pixel art product that all ages would love and enjoy, and that families could get a thrill out of together.

The idea for STiKidotz™ – a 3D pixel art sticker - stemmed from Yannie, as she told me she loved the idea of generating DIY decals. She thought that many decals were just two-dimensional and weren't as fun. Thus, we came up with the STiKidotz™ to allow clients to customize their daily life items. We wanted something that could be removed and repositioned many times, could be designed and redesigned, and was safe, non toxic and wouldn’t leave a residue.

What We Hope

While technology is a useful and necessary part of all our lives, we look at STiKidotz™ as a way to create a family bonding experience outside of a digital environment. Products like Minecraft show that there is an appeal to creating and designing a pixel art world, and we hope to find a way to use that interest to drive people away from “devices” to create and build with family and friends IRL (in real life). Something else that we are discovering in the process of sharing our ideas with family and friends, as well as strangers, is the educational potential that STiKidotz™ has. It is a fun and engaging way to practice fine motor, design, graphing, visual spatial, and creative world building skills. We think STiKidotz™ would have great success in the classroom and hope to see them used as part of a STEAM-related curriculum.