This month’s book review is from the entrepreneur Joanna Jensen and her book ‘Making Business Child’s Play’ is an honest and highly practical founder’s memoir that charts the creation, rise and sale of Childs Farm one of the UK’s most successful children’s skincare brands.
I had the pleasure of meeting Joanna at a recent EIS Association event to hear her story first hand and she kindly signed my copy. She built her business using EIS investment and is a huge advocate for SEIS and EIS.
What sets the book apart is the blend of personal vulnerability, commercial grit and clear business frameworks wrapped in storytelling that feels genuinely lived.
At its heart, the Childs Farm journey begins with a very real problem: Jensen’s daughter suffered from severe eczema, and none of the products available on the market offered the gentle, effective relief she needed. The story of the first time Jensen realised the extent of the issue becomes the emotional catalyst that propels the book. From this moment, she commits to creating something better, even without manufacturing expertise, retail relationships or product-development experience.
She openly says that she hadn’t heard of FMCG, ie Fast Moving Consumer Goods, and had to write it out on her hand so that she could remember it when talking to people.
The book charts the story from an idea to taking on an established market with a scalable, purpose-led brand and takes you through the decision-making process, setbacks and turning points that defined the early years. Her aim is to open doors to all the elements you need to consider at every stage of the journey to become a brand creator, owner and winner in retail.
It takes aspiring retail entrepreneurs all from way through:
- Fledgling Idea
- Develop into a viable product
- Creating an authentic brand
- Protecting the IP
- How to find a manufacturer
- Make a prototype
- Explores logistics
- Ensuring the legal side is squared off
- Negotiating with all parties
- Essentials of supply change management
- Stock management
- Writing a business plan
- Writing a marketing plan
- How to manage growth
Joanna feels that the qualities of an entrepreneur include being a world class salesperson, someone willing to try things, being goal driven and decisive, focused on the detail, insistent on getting good value for money, being driven determined and resilient and persistent and she relates these to her own journey.
She is obsessed that you must know your consumer, know your consumer and know your consumer, and emphasises deep consumer-insight as the bedrock of brand-building.
One story involved packaging and character creation. Rather than opting for standard baby-care pastel packaging, she chose bold illustrations featuring horses, pirates, mermaids and farm characters inspired by her own countryside home. She tells the story of brainstorming with illustrators at her kitchen table, creating the now-well-recognised Childs Farm characters.
Joanna also offers open accounts of the difficulties of scaling a fast-growing brand. She recounts issues with stock shortages, unexpected ingredient delays and cash-flow squeezes.
She stresses the importance of moving early from prototype to production line but with a mindset of testing & learning i.e., minimum viable product thinking, but with an eye to scale.
Supply-chain, stock-management, margin discipline, cash-flow and forecast rigour are all covered in some detail and great advice to anyone planning or setting off on their retail journey. There is some great help on understanding your margins as they relate to different customers.She also stresses that brand vision must be married to operational discipline.
Branding, packaging, positioning and story matter but cannot mask weak economics. The book ties creative brand-thinking to margin work, to retailer channel strategy, to logistics cost, to stock risk. Many founder-stories stop at ‘we found a niche and scaled’ but this offers more of the mechanics behind scaling.
Various external experts also add their experiences and advice to the story. These are all people Joanna has worked with through the journey and include the chief growth and marketing office at PZ Cussons, commercial and website lawyers as well as former commercial directors and the former CFO at Childs Farm.
She eventually sold the business to PZ Cusssons for £40m and is now an advisor and investor.
Joanna takes readers behind the scenes of developing a product, building a brand, overcoming crises, and navigating rapid growth. It is part founder memoir, part business manual, and part inspirational reminder that the best businesses often begin with a deeply personal mission and an immense amount of persistence.
For anyone embarking on a new retail business or dealing with the pressures and the ups and downs of early-stage businesses, this is a great read. Whilst it is predominantly pitched at those in retail entrepreneurship, any early-stage business owner would benefit hugely from this book.