Hey tomorrow is Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day, a day to celebrate homeworkers
"Bathrobes aren’t just for lounging around anymore. In fact, they’ve become the emblem
of freedom or a growing class of entrepreneurs—work-from-home
(which includes us 'mumpreneurs') and business people around the globe. "
So the fifth birthday has come and gone, complete with 34 small boys dressed as pirates and 2 small princesses watching the antics of a grown man dressed as a pirate (aka Captain Barnacle / Mr Brown’s Pig). Turning 5 made Gabe question his own mortality with a lot of discussion about death and the apparent belief that he was now that much closer to his own…
This week also saw me jumping neatly out of my comfort zone to perform in the Bristol Storytelling Festival’s Storytelling Slam Competition thingy. No I didn’t win but I didn’t make a fool of myself either and was even voted for by real people and everything. I chose a Cuban folk tale from Barefoot’s ‘Riddle Me This’ by the wonderful Hugh Lupton – a brilliant book about riddles and puzzling tales.
I have to confess to being one of the transgressors who’s tangled up in the Inland Revenue’s website problems, still haven’t filed my return as it’s still down, painstakingly reconciling stock in and out for the books was fun, especially as I hadn’t kept my records up-to-date. I won’t even bother to say it won’t be like that next year!
Next week is Chinese New Year so I’ll be running all over Bristol doing special Tatty Bumpkin sessions at nurseries, schools and the like with my big papier mache dragon head… Some activities to come on that…
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Last year we won the What’s On 4 Little Ones 2007 Awards sponsored by Organix, bronze award for best national children’s activity for children aged 2-5 years.We need to win it again so if you know how brilliantTatty Bumpkin is then please click on the above link and vote… |
I could have sworn I heard myself say ‘it’ll be much quieter after Christmas’. Well I was wrong. In the last two weeks we’ve:
I have to say that it’s been a brilliant but exhausting couple of weeks though…
When I was little I lived in Western Canada and a fine place to grow up it was too. Autumn was a particularly beautiful time with feet-high piles of crispy leaves, unlike the soggy piles we often get here. But I can’t complain, one day the boys and a friend found 67 conkers in an afternoon and what a lovely afternoon it was too…Here is the news:
1) Barefoot have loads of great books out (www.mybarefootbooks.com/paulabrown) for Christmas, let me know if you fancy having a few friends round to look at the books and get some free yourself (or if you’re school is running a fundraising Christmas do). Barefoot’s ‘The Boy Who Grew Flowers’ is on at the Egg theatre in Bath shortly – a great book and will be a great play
2) I need some exercise and am looking for inspiring ways to get fit – please feed back on any groovy ways to shed pounds (I’ll publish them so we can share)
3) We’re starting a new Woodcraft Folk group for 4-6 year olds in North Bristol, let me know if you’re interested in this Woodchips group
4) If you are self-employed, not currently working or your office Christmas do is downright dull, email me at paulabrown@mybarefootbooks.com to join us on our not-employed Christmas do! A motley crue of full-time mums, lonely self-employed folk, peripatetic workers (a long, long way away from your head office) and those who tend to make a spectacle of themselves at their office do and need to give it a miss this year. Last year we went to the One Stop Thali cafe and were serenaded by a man playing a saw, yes a real saw. Where will it be this year? Who knows but it’ll be serene, we might even have that third glass of wine this year and maybe even dance… So do join the tired-mums-and-dads on their one and only night out of the year (well almost!)…
5) I may be expanding my Tatty Bumpkin business (cue maniacal laughter!) and may be looking for a business partner with a multitude of skills and a little bit of time. Email me if you love children, have boundless energy and a little bit of time…
Paula 
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What inspired you to set up Tatty Bumpkin?
I was a yoga teacher and lived on an organic farm – I was also teaching baby yoga, I breast fed for 18 months, and literally all that pent up creativity just exploded when I stopped feeding and I was taken over by the irrepressible Tatty Bumpkin!
What is your background?
Originally a graphic designer, and later a yoga teacher and organic farmer.
Did you have a good support network around you when you were setting the business up – in terms of childcare?
My family are very close, and my husband at that time was self-employed, so yes, I was lucky in that sense.
How does running the business fit round your family now?
Its hard – I don’t think women can have it all, something has to give, but working from home and Oscar at school within cycling distance, means I maximise time on the business and with him, but you always feel something is compromised. I think we women have too many choices to make.
What research did you do, to know the business would work?
Actually, I didn’t! It was a very intuitive thing, I just followed my heart and trusted it would work.
Financially, how did you set up Tatty Bumpkin – did you have any grants/funding?
We self funded from savings, and because I am a designer, a huge amount of start-up costs that would have been incurred in design and branding were negated. On-going, I have used a lot of friends to call in favours of work – I guess one advantage of starting business when a bit older, means you have the contacts already in place!
How did you launch the business (i.e. did you start in one location and branch out? did you run one class a week and expand?)
Probably that’s what I should have done, but in fact went for global domination from the start! I just totally believed it would work. I tested it locally and then started running nationwide training sessions. Working alongside Sue Cheveley – a pediatric physio, to develop the training gave me the confidence to believe in what we were offering.
When did you know it was time to get an employee?
I knew I needed one from the beginning if I wasn’t going to compromise my time with Oscar. Even now, I would prefer to take less money and employ someone until Oscar goes to full time school, rather than lose out on time together – but of course it has its downsides as the office is right next door to home, so its very hard to switch off.
You offer the fantastic franchise opportunity for Mums to work running Tatty Bumpkin classes – was this always the aim of the business, or did this element grow organically?
Yes we always knew that mums would make the best teachers as they have the connection with children, so that has always been our aim.
What has been the biggest hurdle you’ve faced in setting up Tatty Bumpkin?
I’m so into the creative side, that I really find the financial and sales side very difficult. Luckily I am in a position now to get help from those who know what they are doing! I know my strengths, but its my weaknesses that are the concern.
What has been the best bit of PR/Marketing you’ve had?
We had a 4 page feature in You magazine, but you won’t have seen it as they havent run it yet! That’s always a risk, but if it gets to print that would be amazing. Otherwise, our Tatty Bumpkin doll topped the Indpendents top 50 eco buys.
Also we’ve just won the bronze award for best national children’s activity for ages 2-5 years from What’s On For Little Ones (www.whatsonforlittleones.co.uk) and Organix, which we’re very proud of!’
Do you enjoy running your own business?
Love it. I have only ever had a full time job for 2 years and that involved travel and was for a start-up. I really thrive on the risk, and even if it all went wrong, I would never regret it.
What is the biggest benefit to your family of you being self-employed?
I’ve nearly always been self-employed, I’m very disorganised, so I couldn’t possibly imagine life where I had to be somewhere at a certain time, so I guess that I am totally flexible is a big advantage to everyone. If I have to do something or take a break, I will – nothing is so important it won’t wait.
Any advice for Mums who would like to set-up their own business?
Just do it. Think about all the people who have a good business and are far less talented/motivated/inspired than yourself, and what do you have to lose? If it goes wrong, at least you tried and will have learnt valuable lessons!
Paula Brown is a local mum of 2 boys, Gabriel (4,see About) and Jude (22 months) who runs the Tatty Bumpkin sessions and also sells the brilliant Barefoot Books www.mybarefootbooks.com/PaulaBrown, children’s books with amazing artwork and stories from different cultures, to schools and families throughout Bristol.
Paula has recently won a trip to the South of France with Barefoot Books – a combined relaxation trip and conference – for her team development. Since having children she has been interested in the dilemma mums face regarding going back to work and wanted to find a better work/life balance. Starting the business only a year or so ago she has recruited over 30 people to her team, many of these mums in the Bristol area who want to combine motherhood with flexible work where they can still see their children and bring another skill to parenthood in the form of brilliant stories!
She also runs Tatty Bumpkin classes and helps to recruit mums to do this too www.paulabrown.tattybumpkin.com (featured in the Evening Post last year).
Footnotes
Barefoot Books run a direct selling scheme. For information about joining visit www.mybarefootbooks.com/PaulaBrown or email barefoot-paula@blueyonder.co.uk.
For more information call 0117 952 0070, email PaulaBrown@mybarefootbooks.com
Name – Tessa StricklandLocation – Rural Somerset
Family – Francis (19), Rollo (17) Zoe (15).
What inspired you to set up Barefoot Books?
I think there were three sources: first, my memories of being transported by stories as a child and an awareness as I moved into parenting of the ways in which I was half-consciously continuing to use them as a source of nourishment; secondly, my awareness of the central place of story in therapeutic circles and the relevance of this to sane parenting; thirdly, my children and my desire to get away from a corporate lifestyle and run a business in a way which included them.
What is your background?
I was brought up in the wilds of Yorkshire, in a large and semi-dysfunctional Catholic family. From as long as I can remember, I have loved to travel and explore other cultures and their languages so I have always looked ‘over the fence’ at other traditions, first through books, later by putting a pack on my back and heading for the hills. I was educated at Cambridge and worked as a teacher in Japan before entering a career in publishing, first with Penguin Books, then with Random House.
You set up Barefoot Books with Nancy Traversy – how did you meet Nancy? Do you think it makes life easier having a business partner?
A lot of people assume that Nancy and I were friends before Barefoot started. In fact, we met through the good offices of one of my brothers, Anthony, who is a long-term friend of Nancy’s husband. I was going round trying to work out how to start a business and Anthony said, ‘you need to talk to Nancy’, Nancy having just resigned from her position as MD of a design group in Covent Garden following the birth of her daughter. So we met and talked and liked each other and realized we had complementary talents and it went from there.
How did you find the first Author/Illustrator for your first book?
I was lucky enough to have the support of many authors with whom I was already working at Random House, so this was fairly straightforward.
Was it hard getting the first books published?
It is quite a culture shock going from a multinational to a start-up – no-one has heard of you. However, one of the wonderful aspects about the publishing world is that people tend to be very supportive and generous with their knowledge. You just have to keep asking questions, and questioning, and looking ahead, and sticking to your values at the same time.
Did you have a good support network around you when you were setting the business up – in terms of childcare?
No! I resigned from Random House, left London, left my husband and started Barefoot all in the same year, with three children under five. I found a dilapidated farmhouse north of Bath, packed up everything and drove west. The house was beautiful but isolated, with no central heating, crows in the chimney and weeds in every direction. It was all very character-forming for all of us! I got help in the form of a friend with whom I had trained as a yoga teacher – he helped out with the kids in return for free accommodation in the freezing farmhouse, and has remained a close family friend ever since.
How does running the business fit round your family now?
It’s much easier now that the children are older and now that the office is no longer in my home. We had a watershed year in 2001 – until then, Nancy had run all the management, sales and marketing functions of the business from her home in north London , while I looked after product development, foreign rights and contractual issues from my home. We opened an office in the US in 1998 and three years later Nancy, who is Canadian and married to an American citizen, said she wanted to move to the US because it was next-to-impossible to manage the North American business from a distance. At this juncture, there were too many people to fit into my farmhouse and anyway, I was ready to move on from renting and to move into offices. We now run the business from offices in Bath, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What research did you do, to know the business would work?
I think it is impossible to tell if a business will work – you just have to believe in what you are doing and believe that it will resonate to other people too and ensure that your product is as good as you can make it and that you look after your relationships with everyone – from authors and artists to retailers and educators and of course, the people you work with.
Financially, how did you set up Barefoot Books – did you have any grants/funding?
We applied for the Business Expansion Scheme and met the criteria, which made it a lot easier, as investors could recover part of their investment on their next tax return and also enjoy tax-free dividends if the business survived for more than five years.
You offer the fantastic Stallholder opportunity for Mums to work selling Barefoot Books – was this always the aim of the business, or did this element grow organically?
In the early days, this wasn’t our aim. However, in 1998 we conducted quite an extensive survey among our mail order customers and one of the questions was, ‘would you like to sell Barefoot Books as an independent distributor’ and so many people ticked that box that we thought we’d better do something!
What has been the biggest hurdle you’ve faced in setting up the business?
I think for me it was about plucking up the courage to acknowledge what I didn’t know and believe that I could go out and find out enough to ‘join the dots’ and get started.
What has been the best bit of PR/Marketing you’ve had?
The five-year-old daughter of one of our top Stallholders saying recently: ‘When I grow up I am going to be a Mummy and I am going to sell Barefoot Books’!
Before you set up your own business had you looked into finding a job with an employer?
I had been an employee for twelve years but I’d say one of the experiences that radically affected my perception of what I wanted to do with my life/how I wanted to use my abilities was becoming a mother. I was the provider, not the dependent, from the birth of my first son, and somehow that created a significant inner shift in me.
Do you think single parents face extra challenges when thinking about work?
Yes and no. I think a lot depends on your circumstances. If there is conflict in a marriage, it can be very suffocating. I know one of the reasons I left my husband was that he would have destroyed my emerging confidence. Having said that, whatever the differences between us, he has always been a committed father to the children and this has been immeasurably valuable. We remain good friends and I shall always be grateful to him for his ongoing dedication to the children.
If you hadn’t set up Barefoot Books do you think you would have returned to work? Had you had any ideas about what you might do?
I was in full-time work when I decided to start Barefoot – I looked at my life and realized I didn’t want to hand my children to someone else every morning, and get home when they were in bed. If I hadn’t started Barefoot, I would probably have done more writing and supported myself and my family that way.
What is the biggest benefit to your family of you being self-employed?
The flexibility it offers and the freedom – this is more psychological than practical, as there is always masses to do, but knowing that you can choose what books to develop, and with whom, is very liberating.
Any advice to lone parents who would like to set up their own business, but aren’t sure how they could manage to juggle running a business and looking after their children?
Go for it! You will almost certainly need help, and you will find it, and you will have a lot of fun and learn a lot along the way. You only live once, so why not make the most of all that talent you have tucked away inside you? And let your children know what you are doing – my children have been a huge support to me and continue to be so.
Find out more about the Barefoot Books Stallholder opportunity www.mybarefootbooks.com/PaulaBrown
Kids are really smart, says the owner of Barefoot Books. And big bookstore chains are stupid. After 13 years in independent publishing, Nancy Traversy definitely has some stories.
Barefoot Books is what entrepreneurial moms want their businesses to be when they grow up. The $6.5 million company, founded by Nancy Traversy and Tessa Strickland in 1993, commissions and publishes children’s books that are profound and imaginative enough to make librarians’ hearts go pitter-pat, and visually stunning enough to win over design-centric retailers like museum shops. With seven children between them, the two women built the company from their respective homes in England, pulling off a work-life balancing act of Ringling Brothers proficiency. To date, Barefoot has released more than 400 books–almost all of them still in print–and ancillary products that include puppets, puzzles, and CDs. Traversy, who runs the business side of Barefoot while Strickland handles the editorial, operates out of a Crayola-colored office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I was born in Canada to a family of artists. I studied business, which made me the black sheep. After college I worked for the banking division of Pricewaterhouse in London. One day I was wearing a suit. One of the partners said to me, “Women don’t wear trousers” and sent me home to change. It was a formative experience.
I spent the next few years as managing director for a small London design company called FM Design. Those were the heady days when British Telecom was spending a million pounds on its logo. We designed luggage for Samsonite and did electronics for Sanyo.
I had my first child in 1992 and decided I no longer wanted to work for other people. So when my baby was two weeks old I started a management consultancy for small creative businesses. I helped one entrepreneur launch a board game meant to help train executives. I helped an opera singer start her own recording studio.
In 1992 I met Tessa Strickland. Tessa had worked at Penguin and run the mind-body-spirit list for Random House. She was very interested in Jungian analysis, fairy tales, and Eastern religion. She had an idea for a company that would bring multicultural stories with art-quality illustrations to children. The name Barefoot Books came to her in a dream.
At that time, the big thing in children’s publishing was licensed characters. Maisy. Where’s Waldo. There were also a lot of gimmicky pop-ups: pink fairy books where the child was supposed to tear out all the little parts and the whole thing was in pieces on the back seat before you got it home. The books that were educational had great content but looked boring.
“People undersell kids all the time. Children can appreciate a very high level of sophistication in art.”
We launched our first list in 1993. It was three books: The Myth of Isis and Osiris, The Outlandish Adventures of Orpheus in the Underworld, and The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time, which is a Sufi myth about a bird that saves the world from the seven human frailties. We were perhaps a little too esoteric for our own good. Realistically, you’re not going to sell that many copies of Orpheus.
Typically, we bring groups of people together for a book. For the anthologies, Tessa and I decide on a theme and then find an author to compile it and retell it in the right voice. Then we find an artist who fits the subject matter. The art has to match the sophistication of the text. People undersell kids all the time by giving them cartoony rubbish. Children can appreciate a very high level of sophistication in art at a very young age.
For the first seven years we both worked from our homes. Tessa had three children and lived in an old farmhouse in the countryside outside Bath. My husband and I lived in London. I had my second child in ‘93, my third in ‘95, and my fourth in ‘97. I never stopped working full-time. I was also traveling to book fairs in places like Frankfurt and Bologna, and to New York twice a year because we were selling American rights to all the major U.S. houses. I was breastfeeding, so I normally had a baby with me. There’s no maternity leave when it’s your own business.
By 1996 we were doing about $2 million in sales with practically no overhead–just one or two employees. We went on the Web–we were probably the first British publisher with a website.
In 1998 we decided that if we were really going to grow the business we had to be in America, so we opened an office in Manhattan. I was commuting from London every three weeks with four kids under the age of 6. I realized it was no good trying to run the company from England, so in 2000 we sold the house, closed down the London office, closed the New York office–which was too expensive–and relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tessa stayed in Bath.
Around that time my husband surprised us by arranging to bring the whole family to Kenya to celebrate my 40th birthday and our 10th wedding anniversary. We were on a British Airways (NYSE:BAB) flight and suddenly this six-foot-four Kenyan guy comes up from the back of the plane and breaks into the cockpit. The plane went into free fall: It fell between 12,000 and 15,000 feet. All four engines were stalled. An American basketball player climbed into the cockpit and pulled the guy out. Afterward the pilot came on and said four more seconds and it would have been irretrievable.
I got back from that trip and found two letters waiting for me. One was from British Airways saying, “It’s not our fault.” The other was from my U.K. warehouse. It said, “We’ve gone bankrupt and we’ve got all your books and all your money and you’re not getting any of it back.” I lost hundreds of thousands of pounds–all my Christmas sales from the U.K. I did get the books back.
At the same time my right-hand person in New York said she wasn’t coming to Boston, so I had no one selling in the U.S. Then we sent out our first direct-mail campaign–100,000 catalogs–the week of the anthrax scare. No one opened anything. I remember sitting with my husband and saying, “What is this telling me? Am I supposed to stop?” Obviously I chose not to.
We opened a store near Harvard Square in November 2001. It’s a place to get feedback and test products. We let customers read manuscripts before they’re published; we ask people which jacket cover they like better, which illustrator.
Our books don’t sell in the chains. If you go into a Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) or a Borders (NYSE:BGP), no one tells you what’s a great book. You buy what your kid pulls off the shelf–usually whatever is face out or on the table. That means someone’s paid a lot of money to get that real estate; it doesn’t mean it’s the best book. The whole chain model is a nightmare: 60 percent or 70 percent returns and you don’t get paid. So at the beginning of the year I said to the Barnes & Noble and the Borders buyers, “I really can’t sell to you anymore.” They said, “Fine, we’ll put our money behind other publishers.” And they cleared their shelves. One buyer took it particularly badly. She told me she’d read every single Barefoot cover to cover. I said, “That’s wonderful, but it’s not the point.”
We’ve had to sell through an awful lot of channels just to keep going. The business through our catalog and over the Web is about 18 percent of sales. We sell to schools and libraries, also to independent bookstores, children’s boutiques, gift stores, museum shops. Our export market is really taking off. China has a burgeoning middle class that wants its kids to speak English. Foreign language rights are 10 or 12 percent of our business.
One of our best moves was to launch home-selling in 2003. It’s like Tupperware (NYSE:TUP). We have about 650 people–women mainly, some men–in what we call the Stallholder program, named for those Parisian bookstalls you see along the River Seine. They have Barefoot parties in their homes or sell the books at schools or offices as fundraisers. Last year it grew 90 percent in the U.S.
My kids grew up with Barefoot. They’ve always read manuscripts and looked at samples from different illustrators. They help out with data entry, stuffing catalogs, work in the store. They came up with the idea for Animal Boogie, which is our best-selling book. I know it’s hard when mummy has her own business. But now they feel anchored by it. They understand hard work.
From http://mumandworking.co.uk/
Many of the jobs that are suitable for Mums (or Dads) to do from home involve some level of direct selling. Often when people think of this sort of work they think “I am no good at selling, I’d be embarassed trying to get people to buy things” etc, however we know from experience that it often isn’t like that..and that direct selling can be great fun and really enjoyable!
I found myself stuck with the eternal maternal dilemma of whether to work after having my children. Having gone back from maternity leave for the second time and found it didn’t work I was desperate to find something that earned money and got me using my brain at the same time. I felt strongly that if you’re not happy with your work and there’s the remotest possibilty of changing your situation, find out what’s not quite working and change it! A mother’s happiness is important to her family and although money is a huge factor, there are often other ways.
Two things landed in my lap – teaching children’s yoga-inspired movement classes (Tatty Bumpkin) and selling both Tatty Bumpkin children’s clothing and the beautiful Barefoot Books. Both have worked brilliantly around the kids and been something they could truly share. But what is direct selling all about and why on earth would anyone want to do it?
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have its downsides. Lugging boxes of heavy books around isn’t my favourite thing, I have done some events where literally no one turned up and I’m not keen on keeping my accounts in order. On balance though, if you’re selling something you love (and use!) then there’s nothing better and free products, holidays and other perks really help to keep it rewarding.
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