Stratford couple outline their pitch for children’s bedtime stories
INSPIRED by creating and telling bedtime stories for their three-year-old daughter, a Stratford couple then launched their own worldwide story telling business for children which has been so successful they’re due to appear on BBC One’s Dragons’ Den next week.
Charlene Mitchell-Hood and her husband Simon Hood founded their own business Sooper Books during lockdown because they wanted to create books that not only captured a child’s imagination through enchanting storytelling but also to help solve literacy problems with youngsters in the UK and in America.
The concept is so successful Charlene, 37, and Simon, 40, are now running an award-winning business which involves stories about all kinds of things in a magical world full of fairies, witches, brave knights and talking animals.
Their author-illustrator partnership is joined by their daughter Goldie, aged three, who plays a key role in reading and helping to write stories which can be downloaded all over the world.
“We are inspired by anything and everything we see and hear,” Charlene said. “Human qualities and even funny noises can spring into our characters one of whom is Posh Rat who we spotted on the tube. If we see something that catches our attention we jot it down. The five-to-ten-minute online bedtime stories are meant to be engaging and fun for children and parents and we should know because we are parents too.”
Charlene was educated at St Gregory’s School in Stratford and St Benedict’s School in Alcester before going to Loughborough University where she studied illustration. Simon’s background is banking but now he also narrates in some of the rhymes and stories.
The couple will be the latest business hopefuls to pitch to BBC One’s Dragons’ Den because they truly want to help resolve literacy problems in the UK and US. Their ambition is to be the world’s best storybook streaming service making reading exciting for children and effortless for parents.
But there’s the little matter of convincing the dragons team of Peter Jones, Touker Suleyman, Deborah Meaden, Steven Bartlett and Sara Davies when the programme is aired next Thursday 1st February.
Charlene said: “Facing the Dragons has been our biggest challenge yet. Not only did we have a short space of time to cover our business model and financial details – we wanted to ensure our unrivalled passion for reading and stories came through confidently for the camera, despite our nerves.”
When Charlene became pregnant in 2019, she and Simon discussed the mental health and development benefits reading to children has and started to collate an online library and Sooper Books was born.
The children’s stories consist of short digital and audible stories to multiple story episodes in series collections, featuring wibbly-wobbly aliens, a flying sheepdog, gouda trees, a posh rat and a one-leg-one-wheeled alligator monster – and that’s just the start of the story.
