Mark Champkins

Mark Champkins founded Concentrate a company that designs and manufactures products for schools in 2003.

Mark studied Engineering at Cambridge and Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Arts. When there, in 2002, he won the British Inventor of the Year Award for a range of self-heating crockery.  



He was inspired to create Concentrate after working with an architect to evaluate new school buildings for their effectiveness. He noticed some issues that were inhibiting the children’s attention spans: dehydration, uncomfortable chairs and bad diets were making them restless and they were ignoring their teachers. The initial range of products included padded seat bag that holds books but morphs into a seat cushion, a bottle-cooler pencil case and a lunch box for fruit. His products are designed with input from children, teachers and parents and are tested in schools.

Mark has successfully gained investment from Peter Jones when he pitched his idea to Dragons Den.