Their tagline is: “Help parents raise good people.”
And amid the clamor of loud Nickelodeon shows and Disney stars gone wild (we’re looking at you, Miley Cyrus), it may be exactly what parents want and need.
Abbie Schiller and Samantha Kurtzman-Counter are running a business called The Mother Company, based in Los Angeles, which creates a series of TV shows, apps and books designed to help children navigate childhood — and in turn, help parents navigate parenthood.
They’re part of a growing group of mothers-turned-entrepreneurs who are trying to carve a niche in the children’s education marketplace that’s growing every year.
Here at Bizwomen, we’ve written about at least three other entrepreneurs targeting children: Jamie Brown and Meg Seitz founded the “Bea is for Business” children’s book series about entrepreneurship. And Azi Jamalian co-founded Tiggly, a New York City-based startup that combines physical toys with learning apps to help children develop key skills.
Now Schiller and Kurtzman-Counter have joined the pack, bringing with them some serious credentials.
Schiller was a PR industry powerhouse. Her resume includes positions as the global head of public relations for Kiehl’s brand and the head of PR for ABC Daytime. But she was also a mother of two — and that gave her the inspiration she needed to leave her PR job and launch a business to help kids ages 2 to 9 in their emotional development.
Schiller says she got the idea when her first child was young. She found there was no shortage of TV shows teaching children their ABCs and 123s, but what about their emotional education?
Inspired by shows such as “Mr. Rogers” and “Free to Be…You and Me,” she wanted to make a show that taught kids how to work through their feelings — sometimes that meant learning the words to explain what they were feeling. Sometimes it meant learning how to protect themselves if they felt violated. Sometimes that was learning how to be a kind friend.
Four years later, she and Mother Company president Kurtzman-Counter, a documentary filmmaker, have a flagship show, “Ruby’s Studio,” books and other learning tools. The show is hosted by Ruby, a red-headed, whimsical-meets-magical woman who’s one part Mary Poppins, one part Amelie and one part Mr. Rogers.
Each show (about $14.99 retail) starts in Ruby’s studio with a craft. She asks the kids questions — in the episode about siblings, kids talk about what’s good about brothers and sisters (“someone to play with,” one kid says) and what’s not so good (“Fighting,” one twin says. “Fighting about sharing,” says the other). Those sessions then lead to stories and songs and animation, all of which are visually striking and feature some of the most complex choreography you’ll see on TV.
In an episode about safety, for instance, there’s a “Boss of My Body” music video with a foot-stomping tune and more than 75 kids who play drill-team dancers, hip-hop dancers and drummers. There’s also a three-minute segment that tackles everything from standing up to bullies on the playground (“I may be young/ I may be small/ but it’s my body/ I’m in charge of it all”) to choosing not to do something you’re uneasy about. (A girl leaves her friends when they push her to ride her bike in a “do not enter” zone.)
Each show is 45 minutes long because, as parents, they “needed 45 minutes to get dinner ready and finish those emails,” Schiller said.
One sign that the series is catching on: It has made the rounds among some of Hollywood’s most famous moms, including Jennifer Garner, Sarah Jessica Parker and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Enlisting help
After leaving ABC, researching the market and writing a business plan, Schiller decided she’d need seed money to create the first show. So she presented the concept to three different professional investors. One was a TV producer in Canada. Another was a Texas family who’d made billions in oil and insurance.
Each offered her $2 million.
And yet, three times, she dug into the paperwork and ended up walking away from the deal. Three times, Schiller said she realized that the investors’ integrity wasn’t aligned with that of the company she was founding. It was a difficult decision — and difficult sell to her cash-strapped family. Schiller had been selling items of Craiglist just to send her daughter to dance lessons.
“You walk away from $2 million, OK,” Schiller said. “You did it again. (By) the third time, it’s a little hard to justify to your husband. …I had only my gut to trust.”
Schiller says she became “hell bent” on making the proof of concept herself. So she sold more on Craigslist to fund a trip to Costco, where she bought a $700 camera.
Then she reached out to Kurtzman-Counter, an old friend from high school who’d become a producer and director in Hollywood.
Kurtzman-Counter had moved up the food chain, from an electrician on movie sets to shooting award-winning documentaries that have aired on ABC, NBC, Vh1 and at film festivals around the world.
She first became interested in adolescent development when she directed a docu-series for The Disney Channel that followed a girls’ basketball team in Dayton, Ohio. She had a 2-year-old at home when Schiller reached out.
Still, Kurtzman-Counter originally passed on the offer, saying she was busy working on a documentary, and instead offered to help Schiller find a good producer.
But Schiller was insistent.
“She said, ‘Will you just take a look at the script?’ So I took it home, read it that night and thought, ‘I have to do this,'” Kurtzman-Counter recalled. “It brings together everything that matters to me, between my child, my ambition, my talents and my craft.”
Tapping ‘mom networks’
The pair tapped their own “mom networks” while developing the products. Their own kids appear in the shows. And they raised money for the company from other parents who have a vested interest in the show’s success.
“We did it very casually,” Schiller says, “on the floor of dance class while waiting for the kids to finish ballet. Or at the park with our feet in the sand while our kids were on the slide.”
Their goal: raise $300,000.
Little by little, the money started to come in: $10,000 here, $20,000 there. Some parents, so desperate for what The Mother Company had to offer, were forgoing vacations in order to help fund the business, Schiller said.
Within six weeks, they had $500,000. (They’ve subsequently raised more than $2 million, Schiller said).
One of the best selling points for the show is its lack of artifice: The kids aren’t scripted. The show has structure, of course — the host, Ruby, knows the goals of each show — but the kids are encouraged to speak as they normally would.
“They say better things than we could ever write for them,” Kurtzman-Counter said. “And I don’t want my kids to start acting like a kid in a Disney show. I want him to be real.”
‘Not Nickelodeon’
The startup capital has been critical, but the company’s future success will depend on finding ways to generate revenue.
Schiller’s background in PR has come in handy when it comes to corporate sponsorships. When they launched “The Feelings Show,” The Gap was their official apparel sponsor, covering the clothing for the children and letting them film a show and host events at a pop-up GapKids store in Los Angeles. The two companies then shared each other’s content online, linking to each other on their Facebook pages.
Duck brand duct tape has sponsored a craft segment and national tour that took Ruby and The Mother Company to five different cities for crafting and story-time events.
“Our growth has been a series of reciprocal love,” Schiller said. “It’s effective because we don’t have the budget of Disney.”
Yet.
These days, The Mother Company gets thank-you notes on a weekly basis — like this one from a parent who bought a Mother Company book on feelings:
“My daughter was having tantrum after tantrum, and I couldn’t figure out how to help her,” the letter read. “Then we bought your book after a super frustrating day, and after she read that book, she said, ‘I feel frustrated.’
“I know you gave her that language, and now she’s not having so many tantrums.”
Another letter praised the Mother Company show about personal safety and the “Boss of My Body” segment. ( Click here for the video.)
The mother said she’d never seen the video, but she could hear it playing in the backseat as she was driving. And she began to cry. She was especially grateful for the lesson about how “no one is allowed to touch your private parts except your doctor,” Kurtzman-Counter recalled. She was grateful that her child was learning that lesson and that she didn’t have to introduce the topic herself.
“Parents don’t know how to talk about this stuff because it’s hard, really hard,” Kurtzman-Counter said. “We want to not only empower children around these topics, but we want to make parents’ lives easier.”
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