Emotional Learning Products for Kids… and Their Parents with the Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Slumberkins

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December 16, 2021

For this week’s episode I chatted with Kelly Oriard & Callie Christensen, the Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Slumberkins.

Slumbkerins is a pre-school brand aiming to support families in the emotional wellness development of their children with educational products. Through carefully crafted characters and stories they’ve packaged psychological techniques up to make it easy for parents to help teach their kids about emotions. If you visit their website you’ll see that one way they sort the products is by theme: creativity, family change, mindfulness, self-esteem.

Before Slumberkins, Kelly was a school therapist and Callie was a teacher, so they have the background to start this kind of company. Kelly and Callie become moms at the same time, and during their maternity leave they became unexpecting entrepreneurs.

Kelly and Callie are rockstars, so it’s no surprise that Slumberkins off to the races. Interplay is an investor and we’re so excited and proud to be a part of their journey.

During the interview, we discussed the story behind Slumberkins, why teaching kids about emotions is important, the history of parentings and how strategies have changed over time, what they’ve learned about entrepreneurship, and much more. Enjoy.

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Transcript (this is an automated transcript):

MPD: Welcome Slumbkerkins team. Thanks for being here.

Callie Christensen: Thanks for having us.

MPD: Cool. Would you mind giving taking turns, give me a background on each of you hate ended up doing this. I can either do go one at a time, or if they intertwine sure. You've done this before

Callie Christensen: they tend to intertwine and they didn't, we tend to finish each other's sentences.

So I'll go first. My name is Callie Christianson. Co-founder co CEO of kins, and I'm a mom of three and former special education teacher behind the brand. And I

Kelly Oriard: am Kelly , co-founder CEO, mom of two little boys and the marriage and family therapists school counselor behind the brand,

MPD: a unique background for tech entrepreneurs.

Let's talk about that. So do you mind starting off by giving us a quick overview of slumber Kinsey?

Callie Christensen: Sure. A merkins is a preschool brand, aiming to support families and the emotional wellness development of their children through unique characters and storylines brought to life through our books, our products, and soon to be streaming series.

MPD: Very interesting. Why did you guys create this product? Because this is not your typical tech company in many ways, which I love about it. How did you land on this? Where did this come from?

Kelly Oriard: This is Kelly, the wee Callie

, and I have been best friends since we were 14. We met in high school and just since becoming best friends, did life on parallel tracks.

We were both athletes in high school and in college and just had a really long lasting friendship. That was. Parallel lives. We both played division one sports afterschool, both played professional sports for a while in Europe. And when we both came back around the same time to the U S started our respective careers in education and therapy.

And it just so happened that our passion was both working at schools where emotional wellness was a really big part of what we were addressing and working with kids and families on. Callie was at a therapeutic day treatment school. I was at a pre-K through eighth grade school. But working with the youngest kids and families as a, as a family therapist, And we serendipitously again, doing parallel life paths ended up on a maternity leave at the same time.

Our sons were born just two months apart. So when Callie had already had a son, so she kinda knew what she was doing. And I did not, I was like in, for the shock of my life after having my son who was colicky. I was like constantly calling Callie and saying, don't leave me alone, come over.

How do you know that he's tired? Why when he stopped crying, I don't know what I'm doing. And so Callie and I just spent a ton of time together through our maternity leave. And because it was an unpaid maternity leave. We had this idea of what if we could. Make something that brings together our passion from the schools, our inspiration from our new babies around, doing something different in the world.

And I think we saw that the schools were having a crisis around emotional health and wellness, and we wanted to give parents and ourselves tools to do better and to prepare their kids for what was coming down the line. So it was really through that, that we created the first characters or the first stories and just jump-started things from there.

MPD: What's so interesting about that story is I think it's a common step when people go through a major life change for the would be entrepreneurs out there to grab an easy solution and try to market it. There's a lot of new parents who are trying to create lists of what products you need to buy or basic tutorials.

The difference here is you guys have professional backgrounds and took a whole different creative approach where you guys always the creative types. Creating kind of fantasy characters is next level.

Callie Christensen: So I think the. Social stories when working with kids. And that just was a daily practice of using story as an intervention.

So I think when we were on those walks with our babies, thinking about, okay what if we could infuse it with a character and really the reason. It started out as a consumer products brand first was because we didn't know how to start a business, but we did know that we could, at the time borrow $200 from Kelly's mother because we were on unpaid maternity leaves and we're so broke and teach ourselves to and the things that we could, so where these creatures were, the first additions their faces were hand-stitched and the sewing was pretty basic.

And then we paired them with the storylines as a poem on card stock and fold them at the local craft fairs in the Pacific Northwest, near Portland, Oregon, and at every craft fair sold out. And so then just, it was always this momentum though of feeling, getting immediate feedback from people, even at the craft fair stages of this is so powerful.

My kids need to know these words. And so then going down the line of. Actually, we were going to head back to our roles as educators, when the maternity leaves were getting, coming to an end. And I was pitching the storylines to publishing houses and book agents. And we continuously like got turns down. And so, but, but we had built so much traction already, even in the small community that we had built that we were determined to.

Okay. We're just going to keep going and do it ourselves. So it started out completely bootstrapped. It was a mom and educator, like side hustle where we still worked for up until the 2017 school year in the schools. And this was back in 2015. So

what's,

MPD: what's also interesting about this is look, there's no guide for parenting.

I'm like you, I have two kids. I have an 11 year old daughter and a six year old son and no one teaches you anything. You kind of figure it out on your own. There's lots of books and tools and you're learning socially from your friends, but you guys figured out the social, emotional dimension. Which isn't usually the coaching that I, you know, the topic of coaching that I've received from friends and peer groups and the other places where you've learned to parent in modern life.

How did you tap into that as the focus area? And I'm guessing that's why you got such a palpable response so quickly, as you found an untapped part of the learning curve,

Kelly Oriard: In general, the emotional world. And I'm defining that, getting emotional fluency, just anything in that space therapists know this people who work in this field know it's a young field, the field of the mind and the brain and how our emotions and bodies are connected.

And there's, it's not as easy. It's not as easy to say one plus one equals two and teach the ABCs are, say, this is exactly what you do. So. There has been a hesitancy or a inability to help guide parents around these kinds of important concepts that limit us later in life. And so I think through, for me going through the process of becoming a therapist and family therapist and having the experience of doing sessions and coming up with creative interventions to try to support the family system and support their children, I gave them, it gave me an insight into looking at this from a systemic lens, not from a lens of saying, I'm just going to give you, you have a question, I'm just going to answer it.

We look at everything systemically. And so every book, every product, every tool or piece of media that you see coming out from slum Burkins is in. To create connection to either yourself or to your child. So it's trying to serve a purpose in that way that I just, I guess nobody approached it that way yet.

MPD: Could you give us some examples for people who are hearing this and thinking, okay, social skills, to your point, hard to teach, we've got books and stuffed animals. What are we, how does this bridge from physical products to those lessons learned? Could you give some examples on how that works and the types of things you're tackling?

Kelly Oriard: Yeah. So in general, when you're talking about learning about social skills and feelings, none of that is ever done in a vacuum, it's always done through relationship and through connection. So most of the tools that we had seen out on the market were about managing and controlling your own emotions.

As a way to try to then be in a state, to hang out with people. And we really just took a different approach of wanting to use the melody and the rhyming and the song to use the moment of the bedtime routine or when parents are reading a story to a child where we know that they're calming down, they're snuggling in, these are these moments of connection that are happening already.

How can we infuse those moments with powerful words that hopefully speak to what helps us build who we are as people? So. It's it's really complex and deep, but also we tried to make it so simple that whether you know that or not, it doesn't really matter because you could read the book and you feel it because there's a connection and an intervention hidden inside of it.

And we use a lot of affirmations and interaction within the books. So when you say something, the child then repeats it back and there's a lot of purpose and meaning built into everything. Written into the.

Callie Christensen: What it looks like though, is that it comes packaged as a book and character.

And the book is really just the script that really, from a therapist lens fosters those meaningful moments of interaction and positive attachment for me in routines like Kelly saner on the affirmations. But in, at the end of the day, anyone can pick up a book and read it to a child. And it is the positive words that, and the part that draws the child into repeating the affirmations and creating that back and forth between parent-child is really the magic moment of the brand.

And I would say where we will start to see are the brand, even from our how we're infusing technology and looking at developing an app to help facilitate the engagement within affirmations and mantras, where the learning comes in for both parent and child

MPD: is, can you give me an example of an affirmation?

You think is a key one that people will hear on the slumber Ken's product?

Callie Christensen: Sure. My favorite right now, my favorite always his big foot. His affirmation at the end of his storyline is I am kind, I am strong. I am brave and unique. The world is better because I am here and I like me. So when a parent is asking their child to say those words line by line, back to them, those are just, when you hear your, two-year old up through 15 year old, say words like that that start to become implanted in who they are.

It's just such a powerful thing. And I think, all of us who grew up in an age where our parents didn't have emotional fluency to open up these conversations. About emotions and like tapping into those deeper parts of us. We all want to do better than what we were given and it's not that our parents messed up, it's just that it wasn't there.

It wasn't normal to talk about emotions in that way. And I think that summer kids comes in any unique, a unique time where people are ready for needing these tools and level of support because they really just want to do right by their kids. And that's another thing in parenting. People don't know how to enter in the emotional realm.

They want to pass off the power to a therapist. Like Kelly's groups at school, around kids whose families were going through a divorce or separation her line would be out the door for these family support groups. But what she knew as a therapist and what she infused, even in our Fox collection about change in transitions is that really the parent needs to be the one to speak the words to their child, but parents just don't know what to say, and they don't want to mess up.

They don't want to mess up their children.

So I think in a very deep understanding why Kelly was able to simply infuse these really powerful therapeutic interventions into the storylines,

MPD: and you guys were professionally trained in these skills. Is there a research around or certain theories that you guys are deploying that other professionals would know or people listening can get their head around and why they were.

Kelly Oriard: Yes, definitely. We have a whole, therapeutic Bible and professional disclosure statement that goes deeper into all the theories that we ascribed to from a brand. But some of the main ones are, uh, systems like family systems, internal family systems which kind of ascribes to the idea that you know, we're all made up of so many different parts and That there's different, those different parts of us are showing up to be helpful to us, to navigate the world in the best way that we can, but there is a centered, balanced like leader or you know, why self true self, like inside each and every one of us.

And when we're connected to that we are living in our most authentic and best way. And so finding the place to take care of those parts of us, be grateful about how they're showing up for us, even when it feels like those parts are not wanted or, trapping you, like being curious about them and understanding it is a really important thing.

And then I would say you know, interpersonal neurobiology, really taking the idea of the mind is is not just in the brain that it's a full body. Thing. And that it actually exists between people, right? Like the way that we interact with each other changes our brain. And that there's always room for growth and connection and repair and different things.

So those are a couple of the main theories that we really love, but we use interventions and different thinking from many different types of backgrounds. You know, like I said before, managing emotions, right? Like a progressive muscle relaxation or a teen is loaded into our slot collection to help kids fall asleep at night.

That's a really typical cognitive behavioral therapy approach to really connect mind, body, get tuned into your body, relax, your muscles can train your body to calm down before bedtime. So we just packaged it up in a new way with a character so that it makes. Easy for a parent to implement with their kids.

MPD: What's so fascinating is a lot of what you just described is the language or the concepts that I heard in parallel from my personal executive coach. So these, the, these things that you're applying at the cha for children through your books and your stuffed animals are the same things that we as adults need help with.

Kelly Oriard: Yeah. That's and that's, what's so cool about this work. And I think for me what really inspired the approach that we took from slumber kins, I was a therapist before I became a mom. So I had a therapist, part of me that was very strong and thought, oh, I'm going to know exactly what to do when I'm a mom, because I know, and I'm helping families now.

And then I had a kid and all of that went out the window. Because it's the great equalizer we are. You can know things in your mind, but your emotional world can be at a different level because you have different healing work to do. And I still wanted to show up for my kids and do the right things because I knew logically what they were.

But you know, I couldn't handle the crying all the time and I was getting triggered and then I wasn't showing up as my best self anymore. And I felt trapped by that. You know, as much as slumber, Kansas for kids, it's also this gentle reminder for the parents. Tune into these tools also and lead by interacting and by doing these practices because it's always a parallel journey with your kids and they're just showing you your parts that you're going to need to work on yourself.

And at the same time, you can help them just be in such a better place than you were right to, to figure out what the next things are that they're going to need to work on. Cause there's no world where a child gets through their family and doesn't have issues of some sort like that. We should just squash that idea like that doesn't happen.

Everybody has issues. Everybody has pain. Everybody has. So it's just the process of how you come back to this grounded place where you're coming back to healing.

MPD: Do I know the answer here, but for folks listening do parents need any sort of training or preparation to use these techniques the way you do.

Callie Christensen: No, I think that's the beauty of slumber. Ken's it's plug and play like supportive, really easy to use. Anyone can do it. You know, even people that. Potentially would never know how to tap into their own emotional growth and learning can still pick up a book or read it and to read it to their child and still have those really meaningful moments with their kids.

So Kelly beautifully disguised very, um, deep therapeutic interventions. It's fun, engaging storylines. And it's been actually really cool to see her infuse the same kind of thinking and thought around how we translate it into children's media, how we're going to do it within an app experience to help engage that the, that like affirmation practice and learning as well as in it, as well as how the brand might show up in the music landscape.

Both for parents and kids and you

MPD: guys to date have been going directly to consumer. Is there any plan to try to bring this curriculum to schools? I know you have grand ambitions for whether this role.

Callie Christensen: Yes. So actually we do have a curriculum that we have built that state standard aligned around social, emotional learning standards.

And we've seen incredible traction within the community that is already brand aware of summer kins that then we launched the curriculum as a soft launch while we're still building some of the unit plans behind the scenes. And. It's just incredible to hear the feedback and hear how much the students gravitate towards it.

Because I think that people are craving these conversations around how they're feeling and even teachers that are overwhelmed with the task of supporting the emotional wellness of kids, but not given curriculum to do it are also overwhelmed. And so I think we're finding the same results that we've had with the simplicity of the books being plug and play.

Same thing with the curriculum. It's very like scripted, easy. Any teacher like pre-K through second grade can implement it and see immediate response and results from their students.

MPD: Okay. I want to focus a bit on your community. Where's you're talking about go to market because when it comes to channel strategy, we've had a couple people on the show talk about using community to build their businesses.

You guys have done a uniquely incredible job with us. Mind sharing some tactics, some strategies that have worked for you guys and building your. Maybe give an overview of the existing community to start. Yeah.

Callie Christensen: So our existing communities, our primary community lives in our slumber and social Facebook group.

We know that moms love Facebook groups and that's where we they love to have conversation and build community even within each other's family lives. Yeah. We ended up starting the Facebook group back when we saw so many conversational kind of threads happening on our Instagram comments.

And within our DMS is a brand that we're like, okay, we need a place to be able to have these conversations. So we started the Facebook group and it's grown, I think it's around 35,000 members now. And it is truly the lifeblood of the brand. You know, we know of eight people in the group, that's tattoos of slimmer terrorism at one very cool grandma with a sleeve, with a slot.

But what's really cool about that community is that we actually do operate it. And we have another therapist on staff that oversees the answers that we provide for questions coming in from the community. And there are so many. Questions that are very authentic and vulnerable to what all parents are facing in today's world around supporting their children's emotional wellness.

And it has really done something so unique and different for the brand that we're, we've built a lot of trust with that community in the way that we show up to support them and have that direct relationship with them.

MPD: It's going to give me some tactical things you guys do that have really made that community thrive.

What was a turning point even early on where you were like, oh, if we do this or we focus on this it gives more soul more engagement.

Callie Christensen: Yeah. Yeah. Kelly and I make a point to go live in the group quite often, so that there is that two way communication and the group feels closely connected to us as our authentic mom selves.

We also have. And engagement team that engages on pretty much every post that's posted in there from the brand that oftentimes isn't responding to questions around like what product is best for my child and doing like product wrecks. It's more pointing them even towards like free resources and even other resources.

So I think, tactically though, in order to grow that group, that group is the bottom of the funnel of the summer Ken's like customer journey. And it's been a very we haven't ever paid to increase awareness for that group. It's been an open invitation for once someone joins our email list or an SMS list or, on organic social media channels.

And oftentimes I think some of the tactics are people get really excited about the plus. Toy aspect of the world sometimes you know, the VA, we always say the vitamins are in the books and storylines, but then the plush is like the candy that people just love and are obsessed with, which is great.

But, um, so sometimes we'll say, there's exclusive like news or product drops, like specific to the summer can social group. So join there if you want like first dibs or whatnot, because as we've grown, we've oftentimes had a hard time keeping up with the demand. So I guess from like a growth tactic, that's one to give like kind of exclusive content and programming to the group.

MPD: Have you found, as you go through your customer journey, the funnel, what type of customer ends up opting into the community? Is that your most loyal? Are they looking for some time, your most needy? Is it, what is the descriptor for the customer that option.

Callie Christensen: I would say in that group, it's primarily parents.

There are some that aren't we actually ended up starting an educator group specific for educator content because the use case and the conversation is a little bit different on how you're implementing slumber, kins and why. But I think oftentimes people are joining, I would say it's different pre and post COVID, pre COVID.

It was a lot of that. I want the exclusive access to the drops that I can't get my hands on public facing and then post COVID. Oh, my God. I'm so alone in parenting right now. And parents were finding community online and it was a really supportive group with tons of free resources being provided to them at the time, because we're, we were all in survival mode, which I would say we're all still in survival.

So yeah, it's, it's changed a little bit.

MPD: Yeah. Have you found that the customers in the community have, or have a higher purchasing behavior than other customers?

Callie Christensen: Yeah. Right now it's five times more.

MPD: Okay. So why have you guys thought not sought to advertise and try to drive people into the community?

What's been the thinking there.

Callie Christensen: I think we organically advertise it. We just, you that community is so important to us that we are trying to. Strategize around how do we keep it authentic to us as a brand and us as moms and how do we scale that group? I think, and how do we differentiate what we do with that group versus what we're going to do with you know, I think we've almost launched a loyalty program, like five times, five different times, and then we're very conscious about trying to not mess up what we've already created and same thing for, an app or a membership or what that might look like.

And so with that group specifically, we were really just trying to foster. That trust around the brand, being a supportive, like therapeutic voice in your parenting journey and a place that you can really come to. I think what's different about somber kins amongst most of the other preschool properties out there in the world of kids, entertainment, toys, retail is that their primary audience is really the child and wanting to get the child's attention.

Where are our audience? And our main efforts are on the parents and supporting the parents in their journey, which is that group.

MPD: Now you mentioned COVID drove a change of behavior in the group. Did it affect other purchasing cycles for the product? Do you notice any other change in behavior just proudly with the customers?

Callie Christensen: We pulled all like marketing spend at the time and we still saw a huge increase in Site traffic and even in sales. And I think that was due to the efforts around flipping what we were producing and focusing more on providing free resources and content and doing more like read alouds on YouTube and lives in the social.

They gave us some really great earned media opportunities because post COVID everyone was trying to point parents towards resources because they're all on lockdown with kids at home at school. Yeah. So it really actually we grew and I think we did like over $2 million more in revenue than what we had forecasted for when COVID like, when we had re forecasted for COVID, then we overdid, like over-performed about by $2 million in revenue.

MPD: Kelly, did you wake up before you guys started this journey thinking you were ever going to be an entrepreneur? No. This is you guys. Aren't accidental entrepreneurs. You saw. But this wasn't the planned path. I,

Kelly Oriard: it never crossed my mind. But I think what has been really cool about this journey is that now that we are entrepreneurs, I'm like this was made for me.

This is like what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm I love it. I love the creativity and competitiveness. And then you know, you never know what you're doing day to day. It's always something new on the top right now being woo and, talk to me in three hours. And I'll probably be at the bottom crying about something and, that's, but that's the likely sign up or when you're an entrepreneur.

And I just, I didn't know, something like that existed. And I think it brings Callie and I back to our sports days of being on a team and like winning games and losing games and fighting to get to the championship.

MPD: What sport did you guys play by the way?

Callie Christensen: I played volleyball, and I played basketball.

We both played, both had division one college scholarships, and then Kelly briefly mentioned Europe, but Kelly played pro volleyball in Europe and she was actually training for the Olympics that last year. And I piggybacked on her pro career for three months. He found a team to pay me in cash to soap the games,

Kelly Oriard: the rail pass Euro rail pass in exchange for showing up to

Callie Christensen: games.

That

MPD: sounds terrific because living, yeah. So I want to raise a question. One of the things that's super important to us and corridor our mission interplay is facilitating and accelerating entrepreneurship. I just am personally a very deep believer. That entrepreneurship is what drives society forward.

Yes, people think they're waking up to make money and that's the carrot, but it's the hamster wheel that's creating new and better social products and services and experiences that improve the quality of human life. So why do you think this wasn't more on your radar before you guys stumbled into a pain point that needed solving?

Why is it a surprise that here you are as entrepreneurs successful entrepreneurs and loving it? What do we need to fine tune in society where it was on the list when you were 18? And you're like, oh, maybe I'll do that. How do we get to that point?

Kelly Oriard: I think my sense growing up as a girl and as a young woman was that business was for boys and trying to earn money is, was something that was very.

For the guys like, and granted, I think we're just shifting around these like deeper held beliefs that aren't maybe spoken out loud. But my, my mom was a psychologist and my dad was a longshoreman, so I had a interesting household. I didn't have any entrepreneurs, are people who had done something like this in my circle.

You know, we even thinking back to starting up, when people are like, oh, your first round is friends and family healing. I didn't have any family members or friends that had $25,000 to give us. That was $200 was from my mom. Like that wasn't a thing in our circles. So I feel like.

You know, I just had never seen or been exposed to a woman who was doing something like this. It just wasn't in my circle. And I think of at school it's, and I think of see teachers at colleges. So I knew about that. So my, my path was really determined by the people that I knew that were inspiring to me within my smaller circle.

And I didn't know any entrepreneurs. So I think that's a problem.

MPD: Do you think that might be just