Jeremy Weil quits his role at The Economist to focus on his coloring book start-up – Paul Grover for The Telegraph
I have wanted to run my own business for as long as I can remember. Even at the age of five, I was printing little fake business cards with “consultant” on them. But while I’ve invested in or attempted to create start-ups over the past fifteen years, with varying degrees of success, I’ve always had to balance my passion for entrepreneurship with the demands of a full-time job. function.
That is so far. It has taken time away from the office to fully commit to Color Your Streets, the start-up I founded a year ago with my wife, broadcaster Emma Barnett. To do this, I’m leaving a six-figure job at The Economist’s intelligence unit, where I was head of product. Before that I worked for Reed Business Information and Deloitte, among others.
People say Britain isn’t great for entrepreneurship anymore, but that hasn’t been my experience – although there are some things I haven’t tried to do, like raising money. What I can say is that there have been very few barriers to getting started, and there are so many fantastic tools available.
I had to quit my job because what started as a spark of an idea had turned into a full-time job in itself.
In 2023, Emma and I were on shared maternity and paternity leave. Our five-year-old had developed a love of coloring books and to keep him busy we wanted to find one that would allow him to color in pictures of the local area: Herne Hill in South London. We were surprised to find that such a thing didn’t exist, so we set out to make our own.
Jeremy Weil started Color Your Streets so his five-year-old could color photos of his surroundings – Color Your Streets
At the time, there was no expectation that this idea would eventually take over our lives. I started by taking some photos of the neighborhood on my phone and then used AI to generate book templates. I had a first attempt at getting a book printed, but I didn’t know anything about paper quality or anything like that at the time.
Still, it was exciting to see the idea come to life for just over a few hundred pounds.
We don’t use AI anymore – these days we work with a handful of designers – but it has been a brilliant and effective tool from the very beginning. You can ask him to suggest a color palette for a kid-oriented brand and he will give you great suggestions. This was especially helpful because I am color blind.
I was convinced we were onto something special. We created a second series of books, expanding the areas we covered, and started showing them to friends and their children. There was an immediate positive response, especially among the children. When you show something to a five- or six-year-old, you know immediately whether he or she likes it or not. They don’t hide their reactions – they are cruel. It was interesting to see how immediately they felt connected to their area, its buildings and landmarks, even to things as simple and modest as a bench they had sat on outside the station. It meant so much more to them than something generic.
Then we started thinking about stocking them in stores. Our local gift shop loved them and snapped them up – there’s nothing more exciting than your very first sale. But that was just the beginning of an avalanche. Wherever we went, people said yes, because they love their area.
Remarkably, we have found that a range of age groups are now using and purchasing our products, while we initially thought this would be mainly for five, six and seven year olds. In fact, we get a lot of adults who really enjoy it. People often buy the books out of nostalgia. For example, I had a woman from New Zealand contact me about a Clapham and Battersea book. She had lived in the area 35 years ago and wanted to see the buildings there again. And this was all early in the journey. We felt it going faster and faster.
Leaving my corporate job wasn’t a big, dramatic exit, and neither was giving up the salary that came with it. I simply realized that I could hardly stay because the demands of the coloring book world had become so great. In a very short time, we went from a kitchen table business, where we did all the fulfillment, printing shipping labels and taking books to the post office, to using a warehouse and outsourcing our customer support.
We are now on track to turn over between 2 and 4 million euros next year, which I think is quite feasible. We’ve created around 150 books for neighborhoods across the UK and even launched some international books for cities like New York, Paris and Barcelona.
Starting a business always involves some risk. But I think the way we did it – where I continued to have a job while we got it off the ground – reduced the whole project from a financial perspective. It’s another thing when you go from a stable, monthly job to a business that isn’t generating revenue or growing.
That doesn’t mean we haven’t faced challenges. When it’s your own business, there’s always more work to do. You never want to say something can wait until tomorrow – it’s endless. You need to learn how to focus on strategic things that will really make a difference, instead of wasting your time on a mountain of emails.
As Emma and I work together, we also have to make sure that it doesn’t completely consume our lives, and that we remember that we are husband and wife first and foremost, not just business partners. There have been times in the last year where we’ve definitely gone there too much, but that’s because we’re both so excited about it. Our skills complement each other: she is brilliant at everything to do with PR and the brand, and the visual design of the products, while I am much more focused on the business operations, creating new books, building the website and improving our statistics.
The lack of bureaucracy is astonishing. When you have a corporate job you have to think in terms of communication, stakeholders and all that stuff. Now we make decisions very quickly.
To someone who is considering taking the plunge and starting their own business, I would say: just do it. What I think typically sets entrepreneurs apart from others is that they make the leap from idea to reality, no matter how small it is. You can test many ideas with almost no money – it just takes time and dedication.
Jeremy Weil is the founder of Color Your Streets. As told to Daniel Woolfson.
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