About IKAVOS

A small toy shop in Chattogram, picking toys one at a time for children all over Bangladesh.

It started with a toy that lasted four days

We bought our daughter a toy that lit up, played three songs and had a cartoon character on the box. She loved it for about four days. Then the batteries went, one of the buttons stopped working, and it went under the bed with everything else that had gone quiet.

That's when we started paying attention to which toys actually survived. It was never the loud ones. It was a set of wooden blocks a relative had brought back from abroad — no batteries, no sound, nothing to charge. Three years later they were still on the living room floor, still being used, just for a different game every month.

So we went looking for toys like that in Bangladesh. And they were hard to find. Plenty of shops, plenty of plastic, plenty of "educational" written on boxes that weren't. What was missing was somebody actually choosing.

That's the whole idea behind IKAVOS. We're not a marketplace with thousands of listings. We're a small shop that picks a handful of toys, checks them properly, and stands behind them.

What we look for before we stock anything

Every toy has to get past four questions. If it fails one, we don't list it, however well it might sell.

Will a child still pick it up in three weeks?

This is the one that matters most. A toy that gets an excited reaction on day one and nothing on day ten isn't a good toy, it's good packaging. We look for open-ended things — blocks, puzzles, building sets — where the child invents a new game instead of repeating the one the toy came with.

Is it safe in a real house, with a real toddler?

Non-toxic water-based paint. Sanded edges. No parts that snap into sharp pieces. And an honest age rating — if a toy has small parts a two-year-old shouldn't have, we say so on the product page instead of widening the age range to sell more units.

Does it teach without pretending to be a lesson?

A magnetic number train teaches numbers because your child is lining up numbers to build a longer train. Nobody quizzes them. That's the difference between a toy that teaches and a worksheet with wheels on it.

Is it worth what we're charging?

We import directly from the factories, without a chain of middlemen. That's how a solid wooden toy ends up affordable rather than a luxury item. If we can't price something fairly, we don't stock it.

Things we've decided not to do

• No "inbox for price." Every price is on the product page. You shouldn't have to negotiate to find out what a toy costs.
• No stock photos pretending to be real. If a toy is smaller than it looks, our measurements are on the page in centimetres.
• No deleting bad reviews. If a parent says a toy didn't work for their child, that stays up. You deserve to read it before you decide.
• No screens. Nothing we sell needs charging, and most of it doesn't need batteries. Children get enough glowing rectangles already.

We're in Chattogram, not a call centre

IKAVOS runs out of an office in Boropol Mor, Chattogram, and we deliver across all 64 districts. Most online toy shops here are Dhaka operations. We're not, and we think that's worth saying — it means the person who answers your call is the same person who packed your parcel.

When you ring +880 1622-980882, you get one of us. Not a script, not a queue. If a toy arrives broken, you'll speak to somebody who can actually fix it rather than someone reading a policy back to you.

What we promise you

• Honest age ratings. The manufacturer's real range, not a wider one.
• Real measurements and real photos. So the box that arrives is the size you expected.
• Cash on delivery, everywhere in Bangladesh. Check the toy at your door before you pay a taka.
• A straight answer if you ask which toy to buy. Tell us your child's age and what they're into, and we'll tell you honestly — including when the cheaper one is the better choice.
• We fix our mistakes. Wrong item or damaged in transit, that's on us, and we cover the courier both ways.

Where we're going

We're still small, and we're growing carefully. More toys are coming, chosen the same way — slowly, one at a time, with somebody actually testing them. We'd rather stock forty toys we'd defend than four hundred we've never opened.

If there's a toy you've been looking for and can't find in Bangladesh, tell us. A good number of the things we stock came from a parent asking.

Come say hello

IKAVOS
Isabella Tower, Level 5, Boropol Mor
Chattogram 4226, Bangladesh

Phone / WhatsApp: +880 1622-980882
Email: support@ikavos.com
Facebook: Ikavos

Open 10am–8pm, Saturday to Thursday