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Known for its illustrated, digitally personalised books, London-based kid’s publisher Wonderbly has bagged its own golden ticket.
Since its rebrand from Lost by Name to Wonderbly in July, the publisher has announced the close of $8.5m (£6.4m) Series B round of funding, led by German publisher Ravensburger.
It is now collaborating with the Roald Dahl Estates, launching their new book, My Golden Ticket; A Journey through Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
“This is by far the most ambitious book that we have ever published. It’s everything that we have learnt in the past 3 years on personalisation technology” says Asi Sharabi, the co-founder and CEO of Wonderbly.
The new Willy Wonka story takes the reader through a simplified version of the original Roald Dahl journey, using clever personalisation to add a touch of the unexpected. Each child's name is scrolled into oompa loompa rhymes and character plots.
The Roald Dahl Estates collaboration and the company’s quiet rebrand – an amalgamation of "wonderful" and "impossibly" – mark a new direction for Wonderbly, who have been actively searching for a new creative partner. “It’s the first time that we are collaborating with a third party, which is part of our longer term vision to play more of a publishing game,” says Sharabi.
In the past three years, the publisher has sold 2.8 million books in over 200 countries, with personalised information uploaded to the site daily. Launched in 2012, Sharabi claims they are probably one of the fastest growing publishing startups in the world.
Yet there's more to Wonderbly than books. Sharabi aims to shake up the traditional publishing industry through the in-depth analysis of data they collect from their customers.
“Any kind of data that you are collecting from people has a secondary advantage,” Sharabi says. “If you know how to analyse data and how to extract it, you are getting closer to what people want and what people need. It's all easier for you to anticipate”
The publishing house run their personalised books through a natural language translating software before printing, enabling them to scan thousands of pages of uploaded content and store this information on their database.
“We have a book that is all about your date of birth. We know the birthdays of individual children, and their age. This will allow us to offer more products at the right age and the right time,” says Sharabi.
“People’s values and motives can be revealed,” he adds. “All our books come with a dedication which you can write to a child. Analysing this data using a deep dive analysis will tell us about relationships with the child, the reason they chose this book, and the kind of values they want to pass on.
“You could probably get that through running a few focus groups around the year, but we don't have to do that. We now have data on mass scale which we can analyse and get results from”.
All this – like everything else in publishing, retail and, now, groceries – is necessary to compete with a single juggernaut: Amazon. Sharabi admits that’s still a work in progress. “Applying the same mechanics of mass production to personal production is pretty challenging,” he says. “We need to compete with Amazon in terms of one-day delivery. Currently we can do print on demand in two to seven days.”
However, data collection does give Wonderbly an advantage over traditional publishers. Recently, for instance, Sharabi has noticed a rise in specific types of customers buying outside of traditional gifting periods, such as birthdays or Christmas. “People instead talk about the first day of school, overcoming a new challenge, moving home, a new brother or sister. We are starting to see interesting patterns that no doubt give us a competitive advantage.”
The goal is to continue the development of their personalisation systems, expanding to education, the adult market and perhaps even to customized songs, “Personalised books aren't new but the very first stories just slapped a child's name in the book" says Sharabi. "We set out to turn the personalised book format into a credible creative endeavour, rather than a mere gimmick.
There is huge potential in meaningful personalisation. This can go well beyond what we do right now."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
