ClassBento knew what we needed for lockdown life before we did with the platform offering virtual classes for craft, art and cooking

Granted, when they started to offer lunchtime virtual classes along with a suite of other offerings they didn't know Canberra would go into lockdown, but here we all are anyway.

ClassBento is a creative marketplace that has been offering art, craft and cooking experiences from thousands of small businesses across Australia since 2016 - the first of which was a Japanese cooking class, hence the company's name. But, just like a lot of businesses, the company had to pivot.

Since founders John Tabari and Iain Wang met while they were both working for online fashion store The Iconic, they were able to use their e-commerce knowledge to quickly adapt to provide a platform for virtual classes, where all of the supplies are mailed out to participants ahead of time.

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"It all started out as a way to look at how do we improve people's wellbeing on two fronts and one was burnout," Tabari says.

"When I was working at The Iconic, I often have the team doing different workshops and found how fun workshops were when you're focusing your mind on things - pottery classes, calligraphy classes, that sort of thing was a great way of destressing and improving mindfulness.

"And then the other thing was ... I actually lost my grandma at the same time, she was in the UK. And I lost her to dementia, Alzheimer's.

"Again, when I researched that ... I found how workshops, again, helped. If people are learning new skills long into life, it helps reduce the impact of dementia. So we thought how do we improve accessibility to these fun workshops around Australia."

This month, ClassBento has been running Mindful Lunch Breaks: Switch Off and Create, a series of creative classes designed to help people switch off and practice mindfulness for 30 minutes that you only need things that can be found at an office desk, such as a pen and paper.

This Thursday's lunch break class, for example, is with artist Noeline Cassettari and her llama Cadbury and it's all about learning how to draw a llama.

"Companies, they don't have much time right to be able to do some activities, so we wanted to keep them short to 30 minutes," Tabari says.

"But we wanted something that was still immersive and how do you make it easy to have that immersive experience? Often like say cooking classes, people have to get the ingredients and there's a lot of things they have to try and work out.

"So that's why the llama class, for example, you just need a pad and a pen and you learn from Noeline Cassettari a cartoonist on how to draw a llama and then you get to see the llama."

Mindful Lunch Breaks: Switch Off and Create are free online classes run on Thursdays at 1pm. To sign up for the full list of classes go to classbento.com.au.

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