How I Did It: Nancy Traversy, Founder and CEO, Barefoot Books

Kids are really smart, says the owner of Barefoot Books. And big bookstore chains are stupid. After 13 years in independent publishing, Nancy Traversy definitely has some stories.

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As told to Leigh Buchanan

Barefoot Books is what entrepreneurial moms want their businesses to be when they grow up. The $6.5 million company, founded by Nancy Traversy and Tessa Strickland in 1993, commissions and publishes children's books that are profound and imaginative enough to make librarians' hearts go pitter-pat, and visually stunning enough to win over design-centric retailers like museum shops. With seven children between them, the two women built the company from their respective homes in England, pulling off a work-life balancing act of Ringling Brothers proficiency. To date, Barefoot has released more than 400 books--almost all of them still in print--and ancillary products that include puppets, puzzles, and CDs. Traversy, who runs the business side of Barefoot while Strickland handles the editorial, operates out of a Crayola-colored office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was born in Canada to a family of artists. I studied business, which made me the black sheep. After college I worked for the banking division of Pricewaterhouse in London. One day I was wearing a suit. One of the partners said to me, "Women don't wear trousers" and sent me home to change. It was a formative experience.

I spent the next few years as managing director for a small London design company called FM Design. Those were the heady days when British Telecom was spending a million pounds on its logo. We designed luggage for Samsonite and did electronics for Sanyo.

I had my first child in 1992 and decided I no longer wanted to work for other people. So when my baby was two weeks old I started a management consultancy for small creative businesses. I helped one entrepreneur launch a board game meant to help train executives. I helped an opera singer start her own recording studio.

In 1992 I met Tessa Strickland. Tessa had worked at Penguin and run the mind-body-spirit list for Random House. She was very interested in Jungian analysis, fairy tales, and Eastern religion. She had an idea for a company that would bring multicultural stories with art-quality illustrations to children. The name Barefoot Books came to her in a dream.

At that time, the big thing in children's publishing was licensed characters. Maisy. Where's Waldo. There were also a lot of gimmicky pop-ups: pink fairy books where the child was supposed to tear out all the little parts and the whole thing was in pieces on the back seat before you got it home. The books that were educational had great content but looked boring.

"People undersell kids all the time. Children can appreciate a very high level of sophistication in art."

We launched our first list in 1993. It was three books: The Myth of Isis and Osiris, The Outlandish Adventures of Orpheus in the Underworld, and The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time, which is a Sufi myth about a bird that saves the world from the seven human frailties. We were perhaps a little too esoteric for our own good. Realistically, you're not going to sell that many copies of Orpheus.

Typically, we bring groups of people together for a book. For the anthologies, Tessa and I decide on a theme and then find an author to compile it and retell it in the right voice. Then we find an artist who fits the subject matter. The art has to match the sophistication of the text. People undersell kids all the time by giving them cartoony rubbish. Children can appreciate a very high level of sophistication in art at a very young age.

For the first seven years we both worked from our homes. Tessa had three children and lived in an old farmhouse in the countryside outside Bath. My husband and I lived in London. I had my second child in '93, my third in '95, and my fourth in '97. I never stopped working full-time. I was also traveling to book fairs in places like Frankfurt and Bologna, and to New York twice a year because we were selling American rights to all the major U.S. houses. I was breastfeeding, so I normally had a baby with me. There's no maternity leave when it's your own business.

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