Oh Zoe | EMAH

Oh Zoe was a personalised children's picture book project built around a simple gap in the market: most personalised books were still far too narrow in how they represented children. If you were going to personalise a book properly, the child should actually be able to see themselves in it.

That meant going beyond the usual insert-the-name formula. Oh Zoe was built to support a much wider range of skin tones, hair styles, and visible aids like cochlear implants, ear defenders, and glasses.

The first product, The Forgotten Forest, proved there was real appetite for that proposition. The challenge was not whether the product resonated. It was whether a small family operation could turn that resonance into a repeatable business quickly enough to survive.

Interview

What is Oh Zoe in one blunt sentence?

Oh Zoe was a personalised children's picture book business aimed at an underserved market, with a much wider range of skin tones, hair styles, and visible aids than the existing personalisation market offered.

What made you want to build it?

The initial spark came from Katharine. She was working at Tiffany & Co. at the time, but had an English degree, and her mother had worked in children's publishing as a commissioning editor. Around the same time, her printer was pushing the idea of being able to personalise every pixel. That became the seed for Oh Zoe.

Why did inclusion matter enough to be the core point of difference?

Because the market was obviously underserved. Inclusion was not an optional extra; it was the actual opportunity. It also gave the brand a clear voice from the start and helped build an audience on Instagram before launch.

What was the bigger product fantasy?

The first step was always a personalised book brand, but the bigger ambition was broader. The real long-term idea was a personalised publishing platform underneath: a way to create, curate, self-publish, promote, and eventually white-label personalised books.

In other words, something closer to a marketplace and production platform than a single-title business.

What did you actually build?

At the front end, a simple React site where customers could enter their personalisation details and preview what their character would look like in the book by swapping SVG layers.

Behind that sat the more interesting bit: a programmatic production pipeline using the Adobe Photoshop API to generate each personalised book for the printer.

What felt genuinely strong once it was real?

The product itself. The core proposition was strong, the book was good, and the personalisation felt materially more inclusive than what was already in the market. The problem was not product quality.

Did Kickstarter validate the idea properly?

Only partially. It validated the immediate audience, but not broader organic demand. We were featured, but did not really see the kind of organic discovery that would have suggested the thing could grow fast enough on its own.

What did shipping physical books teach you?

That fulfilment is work. Manually shipping hundreds of orders takes real time, and physical products carry risks that digital ones do not. If a book is lost or damaged in transit, you cannot just spin up another copy for free and move on.

What turned out to be commercially difficult?

MOQ and volume. To make the costs realistic once live, we needed 100-plus orders every week. We had a newborn, the Kickstarter had not grown beyond our own audience, and the next step would have meant committing more marketing spend to see whether we could acquire enough customers quickly enough to scale. We chose not to make that bet.

Why did it stop?

Mostly life timing. I had taken a sabbatical to get the Kickstarter shipped, then went back to work. Katharine would not have been able to scale it alone at that point, and the business had not yet reached a level where it could carry that weight.

What are you still proud of in it?

Yes, though not cleanly. I am proud of the product and what it was trying to do, but there is also some guilt in it because the illustrators were effectively working on a commission-heavy model and got much less out of it than the amount they put in.

What would you do differently now?

I would have been more realistic about what my wife could actually carry without my help. The product ambition may have been sound, but the operating reality needed a colder read.

What I Learned

Oh Zoe was a good reminder that product quality and business viability are not the same thing. You can have a strong proposition, a real gap in the market, and a product people genuinely love, and still not have something that can scale under the constraints you actually live with.

It also exposed the operational weight of physical products. A nice-looking front end and a clever personalisation pipeline are one thing. Printing, packing, damaged deliveries, reorder economics, and volume requirements are something else entirely.

The underlying idea still feels right. What changed was my understanding of the carrying cost. If I did something like this again, I would be much harsher upfront about capacity, fulfilment, and whether the people involved could realistically sustain the thing once the excitement phase ended.

Project Facts

Status: Defunct
Type: Project
Audience: Parents buying personalised books for children underserved by existing representation
Core proposition: More inclusive personalisation across skin tones, hair styles, and visible aids
Front end: React character personalisation and preview flow
Production system: Adobe Photoshop API generating print-ready personalised books
Validation: Successful Kickstarter, but mostly from immediate audience rather than organic discovery
Commercial blocker: MOQ and weekly order volume required to make live economics work