Our Story:

Two brothers, designing things we want to see exist.

Antsy Labs is a two-person design studio just outside of Boulder, Colorado, run by brothers Matthew and Mark McLachlan.

We've been making things since 2015. Some you've heard of. Some you haven't yet.

All of them designed around one idea: we make things that make life a little more fun.

See What We Make

We started before the moment most people heard of us.

Antsy Labs was founded in 2015 when Matthew and Mark McLachlan launched the studio's first Kickstarter products.

You've probably never heard of them - they were the first scribbles of what would become Antsy Labs, and they taught us how to design, prototype, manufacture, and ship a physical product from start to finish. Most studios might call those early projects unimportant, but we call them tuition.

The thing that's mattered most from day one is something we still tell people every chance we get:

We design things we want to see exist in the world. Not things we think the market needs. Not things our spreadsheets tell us will sell. Things we personally want to hold, use, play with, or wear. Things that make life a little more fun.

If we don't want it on our own desk or in our own pocket, we don't make it.

We asked the internet for $15,000 to fund the first production run.

We expected to maybe just make our money back. The conversation we had before hitting "launch" was about a different scenario entirely.

Right before we launched the Fidget Cube Kickstarter project...

... the two of us had a very blunt conversation with each other.

We talked about what would happen if the project didn't get funded. We agreed that even in the worst case, we'd at least have the Fidget Cube prototypes we were so proud of - proof that we could take a completely out there idea (one that we were later told would have gotten us laughed out of the board room if we'd pitched it to an established toy corporation instead of taking it to Kickstarter) from a napkin sketch all the way to reality.

We could show them to our kids someday. And their kids, someday after that, as a cool, tangible thing that represented this crazy dream we had.

Then... the internet showed up.

  • 154,926 backers

    That's the number of people who pledged on the original Fidget Cube Kickstarter project over the course of 50 days.

    It remains one of the largest backer communities in Kickstarter history. We still hear from backers from the campaign today, who tell us they're still using their original Fidget Cube and what it's meant to them over the years.

  • $6,465,690 raised

    Our community pledged 431 times the original $15,000 funding goal, putting Fidget Cube in the top ten funded projects on Kickstarter at the time.

    To put that in perspective: we were a two-person studio asking for enough money to make a small production run of a quirky desk toy. The internet decided it wanted a lot more Fidget Cubes than that.

  • 3rd largest crowdfunded community ever

    The Fidget Cube community became one of the largest in Kickstarter's history.

    When we say we wouldn't be here without the people who backed us, we mean it personally. The studio you see today exists because that community said yes before we'd manufactured a single unit beyond our prototypes.

And then fidgeting became a thing.

Fidget Cube shipped. Then something we hadn't remotely expected happened: fidgeting became a category.

We watched Fidget Cube show up in classrooms worldwide, executive desks, dental and therapy offices, news anchor sets, comedy show sketches, and inside the pockets of millions of people who may have previously thought their hands weren't supposed to need to move. People who had been quietly fidgeting their whole lives finally had a name for it and a tool that worked.

Of course, we didn't invent fidgeting. People have been doing it forever. We just made one of the first products that took it seriously and aimed to remove the stigma, and watched the rest of the world agree with that framing.

In the years that followed, "fidget toy" became an entire category at every big-box store, bringing in billions of dollars in annual sales. There's an entire generation of kids (now including our own) who are growing up with fidget tools as a normal part of focus and self-regulation.

We're proud of the role that Fidget Cube played in starting that conversation, and we still frequently get emails from teachers, therapists, and parents who tell us what Fidget Cube has meant for them in their work and lives.

Over the years, we've launched more than 10 Kickstarter projects. Some you've heard of. Some you probably haven't. Each one started the same way: the two of us deciding we wanted something to exist that didn't yet.

Somewhere along the way, we realized that our passion for tabletop gaming translated well into designing games. So we made a couple.

Fidget Factory turned the Fidget Cube universe into a co-op tabletop game (with a troll named Jiles who's intent on stealing your coffee and keeping you from making a Fidget Cube die that gets stronger as you build with your friends)... talk about a sentence we never thought we'd type!

Storm the Gate: Woodland Warfare - Antsy Labs

Storm the Gate: Woodland Warfare is a handcrafted wooden dexterity game where rabbits, brutes, and aerial heroes face off across The Veiled Forest in three-round bungee battles.

Each one started because we personally wanted to play it. Each one shipped because we wanted other people to play it too. We're a two-person studio, and we'll only ever make the things we'd genuinely want for ourselves.

After these games came IRLA: In Real Life Achievements. Collectible coins you earn for completing real-life goals like running your first marathon, reading 12 books in a year, or drinking a gallon of water a day for a month straight.

We made IRLA because we couldn't shake one question: why don't real-life achievements come with the same satisfying reward system video games do? With IRLA, the moment becomes a physical coin you keep forever.

Today there are many IRLA Packs across categories like Running, Reading, Adulting, Hydration, and Treat Yo Self, with more on the way. Each Pack contains multiple coins sealed inside the packaging. You can only crack open a coin once you've actually earned it.

The IRLA community is smaller than the Fidget Cube family, but the people who get it really get it. The system works because the achievements are, as we like to say, Memory Materialized.

The Carol of the Coin started as a "wouldn't it be fun if..." conversation between the two of us and ended up as a full holiday tradition shipped in a stylized Santa Post Package from the North Pole.

Each day in December leading up to Christmas, the Christmas Coin is spun to see whether you'll Make A Wish for yourself or Be The Wish for someone else that day. In the North Pole Delivery, the Christmas Coin coin ships with a velvet pouch, a beautifully illustrated storybook, and a letter from Santa to round out the tradition.

We made Carol of the Coin because we wanted it in our own families. And our Antsy community confirmed they wanted it in theirs, too!

The next thing we're making is called Collectorium.

It's our biggest swing in years, designed for a community we've been part of for a long time: pin collectors, TCG players, and hobbyists who treat their collections as a way to express themselves and curate the pop culture they love most.

If you want to be one of the first to know when we launch, the best way is to follow our pre-launch page on Kickstarter:

Tap here to follow the project

A final note from Matthew and Mark:

Fidget Factory - Deluxe - Antsy Labs

We started this whole thing in 2015 because we wanted to make things we couldn't find anywhere else. That hasn't really changed. We just have more product lines now, a larger community of backers, customers, Antbassadors, and a track record across more than 10 Kickstarter campaigns that gives us slightly more confidence than we had when we were two brothers sketching ideas on the kitchen table.

Every product we've designed exists because the two of us, at some point, looked at each other and said: this should exist, let's make it.

Some of those ideas turned into the original Fidget Cube. Some turned into IRLA. Some turned into games. Some turned into Carol of the Coin. Some turned into Collectorium. Some turned into projects you've never heard of because they didn't quite work - we're proud of all of them!

Antsy Labs is still the two of us. Same two brothers, same approach we had in 2015. The community that we've built along the way is a lot bigger now, and we're genuinely grateful for that every day. But the studio at the center of it is the same. We design things that make life a little more fun, and we hope you find something here that does that for you.

If you've been with us since the beginning, thank you. If you're new here, welcome to the lab!

- The McLachlan Brothers (Matthew and Mark)

What We Make

Five product lines, two brothers, one decade-and-counting of bringing ideas to life.

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