The Business of Books, Boots, and Blogging with Janssen Bradshaw

Podcast Transcript 

Bart: Thanks for joining us, Janssen.

Janssen B.: I’m glad to be here. This is fun.

Bart: So as you know, many of our listeners are building businesses and looking for a loyal customer base. You’ve found success growing a following and customers for both Everyday Reading and London Littles, And we’d love to share your entrepreneurial journey with our builders as well as some of the things you’ve learned along the way. So first off, tell us this. Are you an entrepreneur at heart?

Janssen B.: I would say now, yes, 10 years ago, not even a little bit. So I’ve had a change of heart.

Bart: So tell us more about that. What does that mean?

Janssen B.: Well, I grew up never having any interest in running my own business. My idea of career happiness was a very stable nine-to-five kind of job, and those kinds of jobs that I’ve had, I’ve always been really successful at. I’m a good rule follower, and so I just felt like that was probably what my career was going to look like.

Bart: And your husband’s?

Janssen B.: Yes, probably his too. I wanted him to not have an entrepreneurial heart also. But as Everyday Reading became more of a business over the years, I definitely drank the Kool-Aid of being my own boss, and getting to run my own business, grow it in the ways that were interesting and exciting to me. I think number one, the thing that has really changed how I feel about entrepreneurship is how much I’ve loved the opportunity to learn new things all along the way. I said earlier I was a good rule follower, that also meant I was a good student. I was good at the school program and this gave me a chance to continue to learn and grow, but this time without the constraints of a syllabus or grades in a way that was really exciting and fun for me.

Bart: Okay. So let’s tell a little bit of that story. How did you get into blogging and why blogging? Why Everyday Reading? What’s it about? How has it changed over the years? I’d love to hear more of that story. I think our builders would too, especially as we get to the point where you start to monetize and take it to the next level and make it into a business.

Janssen B.: Yeah, absolutely. So I had a LiveJournal all through high school. It was just kind-

Bart: That’s a blogging platform.

Janssen B.: Yes, very early days of blogging, but I mean, I only read LiveJournals that belonged to my high school friends, and the only people that read mine were people I knew in real life. So it was just kind of a insular little community. Then when I was, just as I was graduating from college, I had this very dull desk job where I had several days a week. It was very busy on Mondays and Fridays, but very little to do on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So I started reading a few blogs of people I didn’t know and I got really into it. So after, oh, probably almost a year of reading these blogs where I would go back and read all the archives, and I felt like I really knew and liked these people who of course had no idea who I was or that I even existed. I was probably one of those people who never commented also, just lurked, and then you said, “I think you ought to consider starting your own blog.” And I was very reticent to do that even though I had been technically I guess blogging for five years at this point, five or six years maybe, this live journal. The idea of a legit blog didn’t seem at all interesting to me. I didn’t feel like-

Bart: Open to the public.

Janssen B.: Yes, exactly.

Bart: For everyone to see.

Janssen B.: I didn’t feel like I really had anything to say in a format that wasn’t kind of journaly, like, “Today we went and saw a movie.” Or that kind of thing. So eventually I did get comfortable with the idea of starting a blog if I had something specific to talk about. One of the things I love most in the world is books and reading, especially once I had graduated from college and had time to read again. I was working a full-time job, but it was not a rigorous kind of job. So I had a lot of free time now to read again. So I decided that I was going to start Everyday Reading and I was going to blog about the books that I was reading. My goal at the beginning was one post a week about one book that I has read, but within a few months I realized I did have other things that I wanted to talk about, just kind of what we were doing. We had moved to Texas and bought our first house, some trips that we are taking, and so it sort of evolved into more of a lifestyle blog pretty quickly within those first six months I’d say.

Bart: So what happened from there? You start this blog, Everyday Reading, it’s about books, but then it becomes more lifestyle. You talk about what else?

Janssen B.: About a year in I went back to grad school to get a master’s in library and information studies with an emphasis in children’s literature. Of course that was reading related, and so it turned out a lot of my audience that liked books was also really interested in that. So I talked a lot about the classes I was taking, my internships, looking for a full-time job as a librarian. I started sharing recipes because I was seeing other recipe blogs starting to pop up, and so that was something that seemed like, oh, that would be fun to share these recipes as I was learning to cook and enjoying that, and trips that we were taking. Just kind of a mishmash, and also now what would be an Instagram post, like one or two little questions, I remember I wrote one blog post that I think was one sentence that said, “What’s the proper punishment for people who put gum under a desktop?” I mean, now you would never write a blog post that was that one sentence, but back in those days, I think that got 55 comments or something like that.

Bart: Were there any good answers?

Janssen B.: Oh, you know, everyone felt like there was no punishment too harsh for that sort of bad behavior.

Bart: Okay, so, and you still weren’t monetizing. This was several years in.

Janssen B.: Yes. I don’t think I started monetizing probably until 2010, so almost four years in.

Bart: And what did that look like?

Janssen B.: I think the first thing I ever monetized was when I talked about Ebates, which is a kind of an affiliate program thing that anybody can use where you get cash back from your purchases when you shop online, Old Navy, Barnes & Noble, Expedia, and you got $5 for every person that signed up, and there wasn’t even an affiliate link at that point. You had to put in the person’s email address to get them credited.

Bart: Interesting.

Janssen B.: So this is old-school, and I did that and I think a 100 people signed up under me. So I made $500 which you know, I was an elementary school librarian. $500 was a ton of money, and I remember you saying, “You’re so excited about every time you’re making $5 here. I think you ought to consider maybe monetizing your blog a little.” And I remember very distinctly saying, “I have no interest in making money on my blog. I just do it because I love it.”

Bart: And at the time that was kind of a thing, right?

Janssen B.: Absolutely. Even a few big bloggers who are putting sidebar ads on their sites were getting tons of pushback against that. You’re selling out, this is no longer a pure medium. I mean, it was very controversial to have sidebar ads, where now every site has sidebar ads. I mean it’s very rare.

Bart: It’s evolved.

Janssen B.: Yes, but it was a different landscape back then.

Bart: Has that, maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but has that changed the blogging, the content that’s produced, the fact that it has evolved into this kind of business landscape?

Janssen B.: Absolutely. I think one, people aren’t reading just blogs as a hobby anymore as much. So if you’re not providing real value, I think most people are not reading blogs just like, “Oh, I’m just kind of interested in what’s going on.” I think if there’s some of that, yes, but I don’t think very many people can pull off that personality based blog anymore, like most blogs were 10 years ago.

Bart: Yeah. Personality based meaning it’s basically this is about me.

Janssen B.: Yes, and so you better really care about me because that’s the only value I’m offering.

Bart: So now you have to kind of determine your market segments and what they’re looking for.

Janssen B.: Absolutely, and you have to have things that are going to rank with Google for SEO or that’ll be shared on Pinterest, not just like, “Hey, this girl is really cute and nice and you should follow her.” But I think you need to have a clear something that you offer to your audience for the kind of growth that people used to be able to see just for having pretty photos.

Bart: So speak a little bit more about that. How have grown your audience, how have you done things that have impacted that growth and made sure that you are creating content that’s valuable to them?

Janssen B.: I think one thing, I would say the number one thing that has been successful for me is that I have been so consistent. So I’ve been blogging in a few months, it’ll be 13 years. I have never taken a blog break in all that time. I have posted, I’ve just ran the numbers a few months ago, and I think my average was 4.8 posts per week over that 13 year period.

Bart: That’s a lot of content.

Janssen B.: That is a ton of content. So I think consistency has just really helped me. I have just kept showing up there day, after day, after day for more than a decade.

Bart: And that’s not easy.

Janssen B.: No.

Bart: A lot of people have come to you and asked you, “Should I start this blog? What about my branding? How do I do this?” Et cetera, and you’re kind of, what’s your normal response?

Janssen B.: My normal response is don’t worry about all that at first. We both just read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and one of the things he talks about in there is that there are habits that actually change things, and then there’s all these actions you can do around the actual habit you’re trying to do. So if you want to start working out more you can buy cute new workout outfits, or you can download apps, or you can go check out the local gym. But the actual habit is when you’re in the gym or out on the sidewalk running, and until you do those things, it doesn’t matter how great your workout wardrobe is, how many apps you’ve downloaded, how many plans you’ve made until you’re actually doing it, and I think the same thing with blogging. A lot of people want to think about their logo, or their name, or their Instagram handle, or what the design is going to be like, and I think the number one thing is start writing blog posts and see if you even like writing a blog. Do you like doing it enough even if no one’s commenting, if no one’s reading it in those early days? And I think for me, that’s what’s carried it so long and so consistently, is I genuinely like writing blog posts.

Bart: So the core of that is that you have to consistently create good content and you can practice that even without putting it out there for the public.

Janssen B.: Absolutely.

Bart: You can start to just try to write good content-

Janssen B.: In a Google Doc.

Bart: Daily.

Janssen B.: Yes.

Bart: Or maybe once a week, or whatever your timeline looks like. You have to try what is the core of your business and see if you like doing that.

Janssen B.: Exactly. I think that’s true for blogging. I think that’s true for just about every business out there. If you don’t enjoy at least to a high extent what your core business is, it’s going to be very hard to make it successful.

Bart: That makes sense. So you’re consistent. What else?

Janssen B.: I think I feel like I had a lot of growth in those early years, and then it kind of plateaued for a couple of years, and then in the last year and a half I’ve seen significant growth again and I think what really changed is that I got really clear on what my core offering was. I think one of the things that’s tricky about blogging too is you kind of have these red herring outliers. For instance, one of my top performing posts on my blog is, I’m the number one at at this moment, could be different tomorrow, according to Google, the number one ranked site on the Internet for dairy-free ice cream. I am actually not dairy-free. I was dairy-free for about 12 weeks when our fourth baby had dairy intolerance and I was nursing. So one night for fun while we had some guests in town we bought a whole bunch of dairy-free ice creams, tried them out, ranked them, and I wrote a blog post about it. Dairy-free ice cream is not my core offering or my target audience. So I think sometimes you can look at the data and think, “Well, does that mean I should start writing a whole bunch about dairy-free ice cream?”

Bart: Follow the followers.

Janssen B.: Yeah. I don’t think, that’s not where my followers are coming from, my loyal readers. It’s just sending a lot of traffic because of Google.

Bart: You’re getting organic traffic. People that come once and then they’re done because they were searching for something.

Janssen B.: Exactly. So they come in, they find out what I think the best dairy-free ice cream is, and they probably never return. That’s fine with me because that’s not, I don’t have any other content really to offer them in the dairy-free ice cream thing. So I think that that was tricky for me too, is that I had content that was doing well that was outside of my core offering.

Bart: Yeah. Okay. So consistent and focused, targeted.

Janssen B.: Yes.

Bart: Tell us more about the monetization strategies for bloggers.

Janssen B.: So Everyday Reading really has three main channels of monetization. The first one is sidebar ads, which no one ever complains about now because it’s so standard, and I don’t do anything with that. I have a network that manages that and I just plug in the code on the side, and they fill all those ads and I get a check every month. So that’s very hands off and very easy, and the more traffic I have, the more money I make, and the less traffic I have, the less money I make.

Bart: And what that ad network tries to do is feel your sidebar ads with ads that are appropriate to the types of people that are coming to your blog.

Janssen B.: Exactly. One of the, just as a little tangent here, one of the questions often is the ads are specific to you as the user on my site, not to my content.

Bart: Because that ad network buys data.

Janssen B.: Yes.

Bart: But understands where you’ve been on the Internet and knows the types of things you’ve been browsing, and looking at, and searching for.

Janssen B.: Right, exactly. So you may see things pop up that you’ve been looking at on Amazon, not necessarily the books that I’m talking about or products that I’m talking about.

Bart: Yeah. Okay.

Janssen B.: And then the second stream of revenue is affiliates. So if I do a book list about say picture book biographies, and I have 25 picture book biography recommendations, all of those will link to Amazon. If you click through on that book, and then whatever you buy, I make a percentage of that. Usually it’s somewhere between like two and 20% depending on who the, if it’s Amazon, maybe a little less. Other sites are more, and it’s not just books, or it’s not just what you clicked on, it’s what you buy. So if you click on a $6 picture book but then you go and buy a KitchenAid mixer for $200, I get I think 4% of that $200.

Bart: For a certain amount of time.

Janssen B.: Yes, yes. For between 24 hours and 30 days is usually how long that lasts.

Bart: Okay, and the third?

Janssen B.: And then the third one is my most profitable part of everyday reading, which is working with sponsors to do sponsored content, whether that’s a blog post, or an Instagram post, or a set of Instagram Stories, occasionally Facebook or Pinterest. They come to me and they say, “Hey, we have this new product or service, or old product or service that we want to promote and we’d like to work together to do that.” And I would write all the things incorporating the messaging that they want, but in a way that feels true to me, and my goal always with sponsored content is it’s still really useful to my audience. That even if you never buy the insurance, the makeup wipes, the shoes, whatever that is, that that blog post or that Instagram post would still be useful, or interesting, or fun for you to consume. So I say no to well over half of the pitches that I get, probably more like 75%, or ones that come down that I don’t reply to because it doesn’t fit with my lifestyle, or my brand, or I just don’t have anything to say about it.

Bart: So you’re humming along, Everyday Reading is doing great, and then all of a sudden you start another business, London Littles. Tell us about that. Where did that come from? Why did you start it, and how has that journey been?

Janssen B.: So we’ve been running London Littles together for almost two years now, two years in September of 2019, and we lived in London with our little girls for a semester, and of course it rains there a lot. We were coming from a summer in Arizona where it didn’t rain really at all. So we didn’t own any rain boots, and so we tried to buy some while we were in London, and it turned out that rain boots are very difficult to buy little sizes of, and if they do have little sizes available, they tend to be very homely, really loud patterns. So when we came back to the States, and we were kind of settled into regular life post-school. We’d love the idea. We talked about starting a business together for a long time because you had your full-time jobs and I had Everyday Reading, and London Littles just seemed like the perfect fit of things that we both liked and a fun opportunity that really met our interest in travel, in families, and in better products that didn’t really seem to exist very well, and two years later, I still feel like, I mean, it’s really been about three and a half since we first started working on it. I still feel like we provide something that the market just doesn’t have a lot of right now, and it’s just been so fun to see London Littles really take off.

Bart: What have been some of the challenges of growing London Littles?

Janssen B.: I think London Littles, I think if you’re an influencer and then you start a business that’s separate from your content creation, you have a advantage up front, is that you have a big audience to leverage. But then I think once there’s kind of that initial push, then you have the downside of trying to run two very separate businesses. So you have advantages to already have something, but I look at people that we know who only run a product business and that’s all they have to focus on. So that’s definitely I think in some ways easier for them, even if they didn’t have the initial start. So I feel like for me one of the biggest challenges is balancing when do, how much time and how many resources do I put into Everyday Reading, versus how much time and energy resources do we put into London Littles? But it’s also a really gratifying thing to see. I had run a business for, not profitably, but some sort of business for 10 years before we started London Littles, and I was very surprised by how gratifying and exciting it is to see people actually using your product out in the real world in a way that you just aren’t going to see with a content business like a blog.

Bart: Do you remember our first sighting of London Littles in the wild?

Janssen B.: Yes, at the Phoenix Zoo. [inaudible 00:19:52] Walking by and suddenly, is that little girl wearing a pair of London Littles? That was, it was someone that we didn’t know, and I think that that is really fun. I think the thing that I’ve noticed a lot about Everyday Reading versus London Littles is that they are not very crossover audiences. I think my audience was interested from Everyday Reading in London Littles, but I would say 95% of our customers over the last two years, maybe even higher than that, have been completely unassociated with Everyday Reading.

Bart: So for our builders who are looking to grow their own audiences, speak to us a little bit about how they can potentially leverage and work with influencers to do that.

Janssen B.: So it’s been interesting for me because I was working as an influencer for all these years before we started working with other influencers for London Littles, to kind of have a whole different view of the influencer world than I had when I was just on one side of it. So I think the number one thing that I realize is that all influencers are not created equal. Some people are “influencers” but don’t have a lot of influence. They might have a big audience, but they don’t have the leverage to move that audience to take action, whether that’s buying something, or following something, or downloading something. So I think it’s very tempting to just look at numbers, and I think the numbers can be very misleading.

Bart: Why do you think that is? Why are some “influencers” not actually very influential?

Janssen B.: It’s hard to say, but I think, one, if you’re just posting, if you got in early in the game, it was much easier three, four, five years ago to get a big audience that is not necessarily engaged. I don’t really worry too much about people buying followers. I mean, I know that some of that happens, but I’m inclined to think more of it is that they got them by non-buying means, but like follow for follow kinds of tactics. So their audience is not highly engaged, and especially with the algorithm now, they’re not even seeing their posts or their Insta Stories, and so they might have a large audience, but that audience really isn’t engaged at all. If you’re going to work with that influencer, that influencer is not going to be very useful to you. The other thing about influencers is that no one is influential across the board.

Janssen B.: I was actually talking to another small business owner and we had both worked with two of the same influencers, and she told me that one of those influencers, she was like, “Oh, she doesn’t move the needle for us at all. She is like, we are not very impressed with her.” And I said, “She’s one of our best influencers.” So they had a completely different product for a completely different market, and her audience was not responding well to that product, but they loved London Littles, and every time she would share about that we would see a significant needle move. That was just interesting to see. She was influential in some areas, but just not in every. So I think it’s important if you’re looking to work with influencers to recognize not only do they have influence, but is it influence in an area that aligns with what you’re trying to move.

Bart: Are there ways to work with influencers if you don’t have the money to pay them?

Janssen B.: Absolutely, I think so. I think a lot of companies do affiliate programs. Basically you eat what you kill. So you bring in, when you convert people, then we’ll pay you. So I think that works really well for a lot of companies.

Bart: Do influencers like that as much as being paid upfront?

Janssen B.: Oh, I’m sure most … Well it depends. I think some influencers like being paid upfront better, others like affiliate programs because there is no cap. You can just, and there’s usually less oversight.

Bart: So it’s more risk for the influencer, but they control.

Janssen B.: But more upside too.

Bart: Yeah, more upside.

Janssen B.: I’ve worked with Beddy’s Beds and they do an affiliate program, so I can say whatever I want about them. I don’t have to use any specific hashtags, I don’t even have to tag them. I can just say whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want to, and in a way to show my audience why this is a product they’d want to buy, and there’s no cap. Beddy’s Beds will pay me for every single set that I sell.

Bart: What about product collaborations?

Janssen B.: I think, so one of the things that I wanted to mention is I think if you have a business, one of the best things you can do is lean into what sets you apart. So what works, I think it’s easy to compare with other businesses. Oh, what’s working well for them would work well for me. So I think for London Littles, we have an advantages that it’s not a very competitive market for rain boots. So it’s easier to do product collaborations, and it’s a reasonably high value product, I think.

Bart: When you say it’s not a competitive market, you just mean there’s not a lot of similar brands to ours.

Janssen B.: Yes, exactly.

Bart: Okay.

Janssen B.: Yes. I mean, there certainly are other rain boots out there, but Target is probably not coming to a bunch of influencers saying, “Hey, one of our 80,000 product lines that we have is rain boots and can we send you a pair?”

Bart: Right.

Janssen B.: I think that that’s one of the things that we’ve done, is what differentiates us and how can we lean into that. One of them for us is that it’s a less competitive product than say dresses, or hair bows.

Bart: And specifically it’s less competitive on Instagram.

Janssen B.: Yes, yes, absolutely. So I think some brands are in a great position to do product collaborations, but I get emails all the time that are like, “Could we send you a pair of glasses cleaner?” You know? Or I get emails all the time from brands that are like, “Can we send you a free glasses wipe.” It’s like, not very excited about a little wipe that’s going to clean my glasses or I want to share. It’s a 99 cent product. So I think in that case, it’s going to be harder to do a product collaboration.

Janssen B.: So I think it works well for some and others not. I think if you are doing product collaborations, then my number one advice should be to be very clear about what the expectations are. To not say things like, “We’d love to send you a pair of rain boots.” Or whatever your product is, no strings attached because, unless it really is legitimately no strings attached. Like, “We just want to give you this gift because we think you’re so awesome. We legitimately do not care if you ever share, if you ever tag us, if you ever take a picture.” If you’re really hoping they take a picture, or they share it, or they tag you, you should say that up front.

Bart: It’s a risk if you just send it to them.

Janssen B.: Absolutely.

Bart: They may or may not do anything.

Janssen B.: Yes, and as an influencer who gets a lot of packages of things in the mail, and I would say I get much less than many other, if you’re a fashion blogger or, I get a lot of books, but you’re just, if you really feel like it’s no strings attached, you’re much less likely to share about it unless it just blows you away.

Bart: As an influencer.

Janssen B.: Exactly, because you just are already so booked up with paid things or things you already have agreements on, or your own content, that if it’s no strings attached, it’s very likely that they’re just not going to share.

Bart: So is there any other advice you would recommend for our builders as they think about working with influencers?

Janssen B.: I would say that if you are paying a influencer, know that prices are almost always is super negotiable because it’s not, it’s a pretty new industry and people are all over the board on pricing. Just as a quick example, I’ve talked to many influencers who say, “Oh, I have six different media kits that I send depending on who reaches out to me. If it’s a big brand that I know has a lot of money, if it’s a small brand that I’m interested in and willing.” I think a lot of influencers are willing to and wanting to help small businesses and brands if they feel like it’s aligned with their values and the kind of products that their audience is interested in. So I think there is a lot of room for negotiation there and goodwill, and that most influencers recognize it’s different to work with a little startup than it is to work with a massive 100-year-old established company that has a 100,000 employees.

Bart: So it sounds like there’s some insight here in that for our builders, you find the right influencers for you. You build relationships, you can potentially get deals because you’re smaller, because you’re building, and because it’s the kind of brand that the influencers would want to work with.

Janssen B.: Right, and I would just add to that, that when small businesses come to me as an influencer, they are looking for me to drive sales, build awareness, all of those things. Often when I work with big companies, they are mostly hiring me not for my audience, but for content creation. It’s much cheaper to hire an influencer to create content that then they can put their marketing dollars behind. You may remember that I worked with a company last year where I did this blog post and then they came to me and they said, “Our year is just about done. We have about $10,000 of Facebook ad money that we just need to put behind something. Can we put it behind your blog post?” They had the money, they didn’t need my audience. They just needed some sort of content to push, and so mine had original images, a good little story, and so they had the money to disseminate it. They just needed the content, and I think that’s a big difference for small brands versus big companies and what they’re looking for often with influencers. It’s a multiple day thing, and a whole agency to storyboard it, and so I’m much cheaper than some of these big ones would have cost an agency on their own to, 70 to a $100,000. So to pay $10,000 to an influencer is a smoking deal for them.

Bart: And to that point for London Littles, we repurpose, we reuse the images that our customers and our influencers put online.

Janssen B.: Yes, absolutely.

Bart: With their permission/tagging them. It’s kind of how it works on Instagram, but it’s kind of a great deal for small businesses to be able to create great content through influencers.

Janssen B.: Yes, and so I, that’s exactly right, is that with these small businesses, it’s kind of double pronged. One, the advertising side where they introduce your brand to their audience, and on the other side where it creates content for us to share through our channels.

Bart: So I have two last questions for you. If you could go back and start Everyday Reading again or London Littles again, are there things that you would do differently besides having a better co-founder?

Janssen B.: I think with Everyday Reading, if I could have been clear early on about really what I was offering and what kind of things would be useful to my audience.

Bart: You think you would have grown faster?

Janssen B.: I do think I would’ve grown faster. I feel like I had several years there, where I was just, and when I say several, probably like five years where I was kind of just throwing things at the wall, trying to see what would stick without a clear vision of what Everyday Reading was.

Bart: Or just doing what was natural and interesting to you.

Janssen B.: Yeah, exactly. Things were changing fast, and it was fun and I learned a lot, but I think I could have seen a lot more growth if I had been clear much earlier what I really offered.

Bart: What about London Littles?

Janssen B.: I think with London Littles, if we had a clearer strategy for Instagram, and our blog, and our site, that could have really helped us out. I think in the beginning we had a lot of good photos, but it was harder to figure out exactly what we were sharing. We just, we started not in the Instagram era of a pretty photo was enough. So I feel like we had a lot of beautiful photos and a great product that people really liked, and we weren’t quite clear on how to share that in the right way.

Bart: Our messaging.

Janssen B.: Yes, exactly. That was much, I just took five minutes to try and do it and you did one word. So that was, yes. Maybe I’m the problem here. Maybe you should get on messaging.

Bart: I don’t think so. Okay. So last question for you. What’s next for Everyday Reading? What’s next for London Littles? What’s next for Janssen Bradshaw?

Janssen B.: So with Everyday Reading I launched a summer reading chart this summer that was hugely successful. It was a collaboration with a graphic designer that was really fun. I sent the ugliest little mockup you’ve ever seen in your life to her, and she just made it into this spectacular printable chart that you could print very large. We’ve had over 10,000 families that downloaded it this summer and that was really fun. So I have some, an adult version of that coming out next year, which I am really excited about for grownups to do, to track their reading on. I also have a course coming out about audiobooks for kids that I’m really excited to launch.

Bart: What about London Littles?

Janssen B.: And for London Littles, we have our new line coming out in the fall, which is really fun. That’s months and months of work to get the designs right, and samples, and full production. So I’m excited to see those really come to life. Then in the summer we just added our first new product, which was children’s sunglasses that were adorable, and we have some new product lines coming this fall and early next year. So that’s exciting to see. London Littles grow from just rain boots into a more fully rounded out children’s brand.

Bart: That’s a lot. So Janssen, thank you so much for coming in and taking the time to chat with me today.

Janssen B.: You bet.

Bart: Builders, be sure to check out our show notes and downloadable content at builttostay.com. We’ll also have links to Everyday Reading and London Littles where you can go see the cutest little rain boots ever.

 

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