Jeremy Weil is stepping down from his role at the Economist to focus on his coloring book startup – Paul Grover for The Telegraph
I’ve wanted to start my own business for as long as I can remember. Even at the age of five I would print out little fake business cards with “consultant” on them. But while I’ve spent the last 15 years or so either investing in start-ups or trying to create them myself, with varying degrees of success, I’ve always had to juggle my passion for entrepreneurship with the demands of a full-time job.
That’s it so far. I am called time in office life to fully commit at Color Your Streets, a start-up I founded with my wife, TV presenter Emma Barnett, a year ago. To do that, I’m giving up my six-figure job at The Economist’s intelligence unit, where I was product manager. Before that I worked for Reed Business Information and Deloitte.
People say The UK is no longer good for businessbut that hasn’t been my experience – although there are certain things I haven’t tried to do, such as raising money. What I can say is that there were very few barriers to getting started, and there are so many fantastic tools available.
I had to quit my job because what started as a spark of an idea became a full-time job in itself.
Ema and I were on joint maternity and paternity leave in 2023. Our five year old has developed a taste for coloring books and to keep him entertained we wanted to find one that would allow him to color pictures of the local area – Herne Hill in South London. We were surprised to find that nothing like that existed, well we set out to make one ourselves.
Jeremy Weil started Color Your Streets so his five-year-old could color pictures of his local area – Color Your Streets
At the time, we didn’t expect that this idea would end up taking over our lives. I started by taking a few pictures of the neighborhood on my phone and then used AI to generate book templates. I got my first shot at printing a book, but at the time I didn’t know anything about paper quality or anything like that.
Still, it was exciting to see an idea come to life for little more than a few hundred pounds.
We no longer use AI – these days we work with a handful of designers – but in the very beginning it was a brilliant and effective tool. You can ask him to suggest a color palette for a kid-oriented brand and he’ll give you great suggestions. This was especially helpful as I am color blind.
I was convinced that we were on the trail of something special. We made a second series of books, expanding the areas we covered, and started showing them to friends and their children. A positive reaction immediately followed, especially among children. When you show something to a five- or six-year-old, you’ll know immediately if they like it or not. They do not hide their reactions – they are brutal. It was interesting to see how they immediately connected with their areas and buildings and landmarks, even things as simple and humble as the bench they were sitting on in front of the station. It meant much more to them than something general.
Then we started thinking about getting them in stores. Our local gift shop loved them and snapped them up straight away – there’s nothing more exciting than your first sale. But that was just the beginning of the avalanche. Everywhere we went, people said yes, because they love their regions.
Amazingly, we’ve found that a variety of age groups are now using and buying our products, since they initially thought they would be aimed at five-year-olds, six-year-olds and seven-year-olds. In fact, we have a lot of adults who really enjoy it. Often people buy books because of nostalgia. For example, a woman from New Zealand contacted me about the Clapham and Battersea book. She lived in the area 35 years ago and wanted to see the buildings there again. And all this was at the beginning of the journey. We could feel it accelerating.
Quitting my corporate job wasn’t a big, dramatic exit, nor was giving up the salary it offered. I simply realized that I almost couldn’t stay because the demands of the coloring book job had become so great. In a very short time, we went from a kitchen table business, where we did all the work, printing shipping labels and carrying books to the post office, to using a warehouse and outsourcing our customer support.
We are now on track to do between £2m and £4m next year, which I think is reasonably achievable. We’ve produced around 150 books for neighborhoods across the UK and even launched some international books for cities like New York, Paris and Barcelona.
Starting a business always carries with it a certain risk. But I think the way we did it – with me still on the job when we launched it – de-risked the whole project from a financial perspective. It’s another thing if you go from a stable, monthly job to a job that doesn’t generate income or grow.
That doesn’t mean we haven’t faced challenges. When it comes to your own business, there is always more work to do. You never want to say that something can wait until tomorrow – it’s infinite. You need to learn how to focus on the strategic things that will really make a difference, instead of spending your time buried in a mountain of emails.
Since Emma and I work together, we also have to make sure that it doesn’t completely destroy our lives and remember that we are husband and wife first and foremost, not just business partners. There have been times in the last year where we’ve definitely veered too far towards it, but that’s because we’re both really excited about it. Our skills complement each other: she’s brilliant at all things PR and branding and visual product design, while I’m much more focused on running the company, creating new books, building the website and improving our metrics.
The lack of bureaucracy is incredible. Doing corporate work, you have to think about communications and stakeholders and all that stuff. Now we make decisions very quickly.
To someone thinking about taking the plunge and starting their own business, I would say just go for it. What I think typically sets entrepreneurs apart from others is that they go from idea to reality, no matter how small. You can test a lot of ideas for almost no money – it just takes time and dedication.
Jeremy Weil is the founder of Color Your Streets. As told to Daniel Woolfson.
