Building for the Child in Each One of Us: The Story of Vijay & BLUE BIRD

Vijay Bharadwaj is an artist, Professor, and founder of BLUE BIRD, a brand born from a simple idea: creating hands-on, creative play for the child in all of us. Read his founder story here.

Jul 18, 2025

An artist, designer, and Professor with over 15 years of experience, Vijay left behind the comfort of the classroom to co-found BLUE BIRD- Let’s Play a Game, a brand that creates toys and games designed to spark creativity in both kids and adults.

Inspired by his daughter’s boundless imagination, what started as a family idea has grown into a purpose-driven venture redefining hands-on play in a screen-first world.

I’ve spent over 15 years teaching design and architecture across Bengaluru. My wife, Rashmi, a fellow designer and educator, walked the same path. We loved nurturing creativity in students from NIFT, NID, and other institutes.

But inspiration struck closer to home through our daughter.

The Idea

As artists, we’ve always seen the world differently. But as parents, we started seeing it through a child’s eyes. Our daughter would come up with wild, imaginative ideas, and we loved watching her mind at play. At the same time, like many parents, we noticed how much screen time had started creeping into her routine.
We began wondering:

What if we could create toys that pulled kids away from screens?
What if those toys didn’t just entertain but inspired creativity?
And what if we could bring together our passion for art, design, and education to make it happen?

That’s when BLUE BIRD - Let’s Play a Game was born.

When Passion Became a Full-Time Job

Our first product was a puzzle- simple, playful, and creative. We called it “Puzzz.” But launching it wasn’t as simple. We had no clue about D2C, selling on Amazon, or how to even photograph our products correctly. I remember spending hours watching tutorials on cataloguing, product listings, and every small detail that now feels basic. We made mistakes. We learned the hard way. And through every order, every customer query, and every late-night brainstorming session, we slowly started figuring things out.

In 2023, I made a decision that most people around me didn’t see coming. I quit my full-time professor job. For someone with no business or marketing background, this felt like a massive leap. Friends and colleagues asked why I’d leave a stable career to build something so uncertain. But I knew that if I wanted to give BLUE BIRD a real shot, I had to give it my all. And honestly? It felt good being a student again, this time in entrepreneurship.

Designing Beyond Toys

Over time, we realised that what we were creating wasn’t just for kids. Creativity, after all, isn’t something you grow out of. We’ve seen how stressed and burnt-out people (students, professionals, even parents) find joy and calm in engaging with our toys and games.

Every product we launch is backed by research, testing with kids and other family members (often with our daughter as the first critic), and a simple belief: creativity needs play.

We’ve also stayed bootstrapped all through. There was no external funding, no loans, just us figuring out how to build smart and sustainably. And honestly, that’s been one of our proudest achievements. It gave us the freedom to stay true to why we started, to design meaningful, thoughtful products, not just chase what’s trending.

Building a Brand As Life Partners

Working with your life partner as a co-founder comes with its own set of challenges. But for us, it’s a bit like a family game night- you compete, collaborate, sometimes disagree, but always end up having fun.

We’ve learned to keep our professional and personal lives balanced, whether that means a business conversation over a cup of coffee or celebrating both our wins and failures with a spontaneous pizza date. And of course, our daughter has been a silent partner in all this- her ideas, curiosity, and honest feedback often shape what we create next.

Looking ahead, we dream of setting up BLUE BIRD experience centres, spaces where people of all ages can come, play, create, and experience the joy of hands-on creativity. We want to take this vision beyond Bengaluru, maybe even across India. While digital is great, creativity is best experienced in person.

Advice For Founders

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this journey, it’s that there’s no single success formula. Every founder’s story is unique. You’ll meet people who’ll swear by a method, a trick, a strategy, and it may work for them, but maybe not for you. You’ve got to find your own way, your own formula. That’s exactly what we’re doing with BLUE BIRD.

If Not This, Then What?

If I weren’t building BLUE BIRD, I’d probably still be teaching because sharing knowledge and learning along the way has always been a part of who I am. In some ways, I still am a teacher. Only now, my classroom is a little bigger, and my students, including both kids and adults, are rediscovering their creativity.

Vijay’s journey feels like one every founder can relate to. He started with nothing but an idea, learning everything from scratch and figuring it out along the way. From teaching in classrooms to building a brand with heart, he’s shown what it really means to take a leap of faith.

What stands out about Vijay isn’t just his creativity, but his willingness to unlearn, stay curious, and build something meaningful for people of all ages. At Razorpay Rize, we love championing founders like Vijay- the ones who prove that you don’t need a business degree to make a real difference, just a whole lot of heart (and a little bit of hustle)