Charlie’s House has served thousands of Kansas City, Missouri, community members since opening their doors as a safety demonstration house, providing expert safety information to parents and caregivers looking to make their home a safer environment for their families. With a full kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, stairs, a nursery, living room, and a garage, visitors are guided through true-to-life environments as they learn about what hazards exist and how to mitigate them. After collaborating with Amazon in 2024, Charlie’s House has now launched the Charlie’s House – Virtual Safety Experience, taking the physical location and building it into an environment that reaches even more people.
“This whole idea started with conversations we were having with Amazon,” said Charlie’s House founder, Brett Horn. “We wanted to take Charlie’s House and expand it to the world, and we did that through developing this virtual experience…working hand-in-hand with Amazon, we were able to bring this experience to life.”
The Charlie’s House – Virtual Safety Experience is now available on Google Play, the App Store, and the Charlie’s House website.
Charlie’s House and Amazon: Working together to launch a new safety environment
Amazon incorporates messages from safety experts into our shopping experience so customers can use their products with confidence. Whether through emails to new parents with safety tips for baby products, guidance on using power generators and gas cookers after disasters, or through the Consumer Safety Tips page on the Amazon store (U.S., Canada, UK, Japan, and Australia), making this information easily accessible helps consumers quickly find the safety information they need.
So, when the Amazon team learned about Charlie’s House and their mission, we reached out to explore how we could help promote their new virtual safety experience.
“When I heard about the Charlie House’s mission and the opportunity we had to help them reach more people with important safety information, I was immediately interested,” said Amazon’s Vice President of Worldwide Trustworthy Shopping, Rohan Oommen. “At Amazon, we believe in amplifying the voices of safety experts both on and off the Amazon store, getting information out to consumers right when they need it most. We incorporate these messages into our own shopping experience while continuing to look for more opportunities to broaden the reach of these expert voices. Our collaboration with Charlie’s House really speaks to that goal and I can’t wait to see the impact the new virtual experience will have.”
Over the course of a year, Charlie’s House, safety experts, and Amazon worked together to take the safety information provided in in-person tours, and build an interactive environment users can navigate through from the comfort of their own homes. Across five different rooms and different information touchpoints, users can click to read more about childproofing, fire safety, safe sleep tips, and more. Other interactive elements like mini-games and videos are also available to help users retain the safety best practices they’ve learned throughout their time in the virtual home.
“Our great fortune was working with perhaps the most brilliant people on the planet—all the best child-injury-prevention people were all deeply involved,” said Dr. Richard Gist, retired deputy director of the Kansas City Missouri Fire Department and current Vice-Chair on the board of directors at Charlie’s House. “I think, for me, the most impressive thing has been the amount of passion Amazon put into this. They feel as strongly as we feel about it. We all put our heads together to say, how do we make this the most effective experience possible for a parent—increasing to the greatest extent we can the likelihood that they will take one or more actions based on what they learned here.”
With the launch of the new, Charlie’s House - Virtual Safety Experience, Horn reflects on what this means for the future of his family’s organization—one that started with a vision to build something that saves the lives of children around the world.
“When I think about how Charlie’s House started, and where we are today with this virtual experience, the ability to reach millions of people is a really good thing,” said Horn. “In today’s world, there are new safety risks every day, and we want to be able to communicate with consumers faster. This tool will allow us to do that.”
To learn more about Amazon’s approach to product safety, visit our Product Safety page.