Part 2 of an Interview with CEO and Co-Founder of The Wand Company takes you to where no one has gone before in a podcast. Chris Barnardo is witty, fun to chat with and offers up fantastic insights into the modern world of specialized manufacturing. His career spans 3 and a half decades and is filled with stories that will amaze you and make you laugh at the same time. Join us as he shares his journeys through a myriad of challenges in the quest to make some of the finest prop replicas ever made for fans of Pokémon, Fallout, Harry Potter, Dr Who, and my personal favorite, Star Trek.
Chris started out as a designer, but went back to college in his thirties to gain an engineering degree. In 1994 he went to work at Cambridge Consultants where he became a named inventor on over 25 patents, and secured £4M in venture capital funding to commercialize his invention of a thick-film, flexible electroluminescent display.
In 2005 Chris launched the popular single parents’ website Dadcando.com which provided guidance and support to single dads (and mums). In 2008 he designed and created the Plop Trumps card game (Firebox.com’s number one selling product that Christmas), which has gone on to sell over half a million packs in the UK alone. In 2009 Chris founded The Wand Company (thewandcompany.com) with Richard Blakesley. The following year, the pair took The Wand Company into the British TV show Dragons’ Den (Shark Tank, US) where their pitch for the ‘Kymera Wand’ – the world’s first motion-sensitive, button-less, universal remote control, attracted record investment offers from all the Dragon Investors.
The Wand Company has since successfully launched, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor Who universal remote control Sonic Screwdrivers, their iconic Star Trek The Original Series Phaser and Bluetooth Communicator, a range of Fallout replicas and has most recently been working with Pokémon to bring the first accurate, premium Poké Ball replicas to market for Pokémon’s 25th anniversary year which launched in February 2021.
Chris is the author of three books, Made With Dad, Dadcando and Dragonolia, lives in Essex and has four children.
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