Who are we?

We are a small family-run business with a big vision.

We imagine a world where children believe in themselves and in each other, understand and accept their own emotions, recognise their uniqueness and know that they are enough just as they are.

We are on a mission to equip an entire generation of children with empowering tools such as resilience, self-belief, acceptance and confidence by sparking wonderful conversations with our children about how special they are and how we all come fully equipped (born) to be happy and confident beings.

Imagine what that generation could do!

Do you feel excited? Read more.

Equipping our children with the empowering tools they need to make their contribution to the world

Today's parents and carers face a vital but challenging task, preparing our children for going out into a rapidly changing world and making their mark.

We live in a world that can be full of social and academic pressures for young people but when children understand how much the ability for joy and happiness is already within them, they will learn that they need not rely on external triggers or conventional measures of success to feel powerful and confident.

Sparking wonderful conversations about their own power and worth

We strive to support parents and carers in creating beautiful reading moments, where values and inner gifts can be discussed so that children will learn about and grow with these messages about their own self-worth and power. We want to make these topics part of the everyday conversations that we have with children, so that they learn key messages and build up their resilience from as early on as possible.

Conveying important messages through deeply personalised, beautiful stories

All our stories are (and will be) written with this mission in mind. Through allowing them to be personalised to represent the child and parents/carers in the stories, we create a high level of engagement, which, in turn, improves the chances of conveying these important messages.

To maximise the chance of conveying these important messages, we collaborate with early years psychologists, published experts in early years, lecturers in early childhood and primary school teachers.

It all started with a girl called Annabelle

Born in London in 2017 to proud parents, Suz and Chris, and with doting grandparents and aunties and uncles, Annabelle had a loving family around her.

One of Annabelle’s aunties, eager to ensure that Annabelle grew up with the tools and self-belief she’d need to navigate life, and be happy and confident, decided to write the little girl her own special storybook.

Annabelle’s family wanted her to understand her self-worth and to value other people. They wanted her to have the courage to go out and discover the wonderful things life has to offer, to be grateful and to find contentment.

All of those values came to life in The Penguin Party, an exciting, fun story about understanding the gifts we are born with - to forgive, to accept, to love one another and ourselves.

With a strong belief that all children should understand these important values and their self-worth, Annabelle’s daddy, Chris, and auntie, Alison, set about adapting the book so that it could be personalised for other families. They built a platform to allow others to reflect their own family dynamic, skin colours, hair-styles and genders.

Which leads us to here, our website, where The Penguin Party has over one million options for personalisation.

We hope children get as much enjoyment from seeing themselves and their family in a book as Annabelle does. And we hope that they benefit from its messages and grow in resilience, confidence and happiness.

Alison's original draft illustrations (still in Annabelle's room). We then decided to work with a professional illustrator!

Which leads us to here, our website, where The Penguin Party has over one million options for personalisation.

Alison's original draft illustrations (still in Annabelle's room). We then decided to work with a professional illustrator!

A word from the founders

Chris, Co-Founder
Contact Chris
Engineering, Commercial, Partnerships

Reading "The Penguin Party" for the first time was such a wonderful experience, it brought tears to my eyes to know that the important values and messages that I want to convey to my daughter are now written into a beautiful and personal story.
Bringing it to life for other parents, carers and children to enjoy seems like a natural step to take!

Chris, Co-Founder
Contact Chris
Engineering, Commercial, Partnerships

Alison, Author and Co-Founder
Contact Alison
Creative, Press, Marketing

Writing The Penguin Party was all about ensuring my beautiful niece would grow up knowing her worth, whatever comes her way in life.
We believe all children should realise their value and accept themselves just as they are, so personalising it for other families was a total no brainer.

Alison, Author and Co-Founder
Contact Alison
Creative, Press, Marketing

Publish with us, or use our personalisation technology

We recently launched “The Penguin Party”, our first personalised storybook that conveys strong messages through a gift-giving ceremony. We are busy writing further stories which we will announce as soon as possible!

However, we are not stopping there, to achieve our mission, we want to partner with authors to publish their stories through our platform and/or for them to use our personalisation technology to publish through their own website.

If you have a children’s story that you would like to see illustrated and published, get in touch with us at publishing@annabeesbooks.com. We are excited to work with authors to see their empowering stories published via our platform.

If you want to use our personalisation technology to publish your own stories, get in touch with us at platform@annabeesbooks.com. We are building a self-service approach to generating personalised storybooks and can help you bring your story/idea to life.