Women's Business -- Addie Swartz Is a Positive Beacon for Girls Twixt and B*tween

What parent isn’t concerned with the media bombarding their children with negative messages on a daily, hourly, even minute by minute, basis? But how many parents are actually doing something about it? Addie Swartz is, with her B*tween Productions and its Beacon Street Girls.

There are now 14 of the award-winning Beacon Street Girls fiction books, with a fifteenth due early next year. The Beacon Street Girls also offer a web experience, gifts and accessories aimed at promoting self-esteem and positive imaging for girls between the ages of 9 and 13.

It was Swartz’s recognition of the outside forces at work on her older daughter, then 9 years old, that prompted her to create the hip consumer brand for girls.

“It seemed as if the world for girls was spinning out of control. Where was the healthy media that could positively impact girls and make a difference in their lives? That’s when I decided what challenge I wanted to tackle – perhaps naively,” the founder and CEO says, laughing.

Naïve or not, Swartz had plenty of business experience upon which to draw as she set about creating a whole new brand. She had worked as an intrapreneur in a variety of corporate settings and had started an earlier company, so she understood how to assemble the team, how to launch products and how to create something that would resonate with her target market.

Her strategy, quite simply, was to reach the tween set through storytelling.

Meet Charlotte, Avery, Maeve, Isabel and Katani, the multicultural seventh grade BFFs (that’s “best friends forever” in tween-speak), living in Brookline whose real-to-life experiences hook girls into not only believing in themselves, but also into reading.

The books aren’t preachy or in your face and are written in a tween-friendly manner that includes texting, instant message acronyms and diary pages.

“The idea always was to bury the goodness in a hot fudge sundae. It’s fun. It’s realistic. It’s seventh grade,” Swartz says. “The Beacon Street Girls world is one that girls can connect with, but best of all, underneath everything there are core messages that support girls in thinking they can accomplish great things, that they’re worth something and that they matter.”

Swartz’ first business epiphany came at the age of 14, although Addie’s Apple Pies was short-lived. Bent on doing something “real” to raise money for a class trip to Spain, she sold homemade pies to restaurants – one ordered 10 a day on weekdays and 20 a day on weekends – and quickly earned the needed $1,200.

“It gave me a real sense of what entrepreneurship is all about,” Swartz says, “the thrill of creating something from scratch, something you can be proud of.”

After graduating from Stanford, working, and then getting her MBA at Northwestern, Swartz headed to Disney’s consumer products division. What she learned there was “the value of building a brand that stands for something and how important it was to execute flawlessly.”

At Rockport, she was the first woman brought in to run the women’s shoe division. At Lotus, she managed alternate distribution at a time when changing buying patterns made getting the company’s products into the likes of Comp USA, Lechmere and Wal-Mart more and more important.

While out on maternity leave, Swartz stumbled upon her first entrepreneurial opportunity, one she was uniquely qualified to build upon. A friend was looking for educational software for her 4-year-old. Swartz discovered a market where there was no readily available up-to-date information, little access to high-quality product and parents who were at a loss on what to buy.

Swartz created BrightIdeas in 1992, selling educational software to parents and then teachers, using other parents to host home parties or run family technology nights at local schools. Some four years later, she sold the business to Addison Wesley.

After a brief hiatus, Swartz turned to consulting and explored different jobs but she quickly discovered that “feeling really passionate about what you are doing was just too important.”

Fast forward to July 2002, when Swartz had the tween marketplace in her sights. She pulled together seven women, each an expert in a different field, in her living room for a brainstorming session around the business idea.

“One thing about entrepreneurs,” she says, “is that when they see something – an opportunity or a problem – they act on it quickly.”

A year later, July 2003, Swartz closed on her first round of funding, $1.2 million, having already spoken to thousands of girls as research.

She pulled together her team, including one of the original folks at American Girl, and formed an advisory board that included experts in child development, branding and media. She published the first books, got the website up and put out the first products.

The initial plan was to bundle a book with a gift. The first gift was a pillow and a flashlight. “It was hard to visualize how, in bookstores, anyone would find us when we only had a quarter of an inch – the width of a book spine – worth of real estate on the shelves,” Swartz says.

Swartz has been astute enough to “morph” the business several times in tune with market demands. In July 2005, she raised her second round of funding, this time $1.5 million, to build up the web presence.

“BrightIdeas was self-funded but it became difficult to grow fast enough with the available cash flow. A key lesson I learned there was that raising money, and the strategic infusion of outside capital, is important to growing any enterprise,” she says.

These days, B*tween Productions is focusing much more on the web since 88 percent of girls ages 8 to 13 are spending time online every day. “It’s the next step in creating a space for girls that is accepting, inspirational and helps them grow to be empowered individuals,” Swartz says. “It’s also nice to create an online experience that has offline value.”

Girls from 112 countries have joined the free online club to post messages answered by the fictional characters as well as reply to questions that the characters pose (everything from favorite after-school snacks to a discussion on how it feels when your family is separated).

The web experience is all in English (there are games, downloads, contests and more), but the first three books are on their way to being translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market. Along with global expansion, licensing is another opportunity for greater exposure and added revenue.

Licensed body care products, such as shower gel and lotion, are already on the market.

And many more books are planned, Swartz says. “There’s no end to the storylines.”

Now that the brand is defined, Swartz is spending more of her time working on strategic partnerships and alliances. One of the most recent is with Sally Ride Science and their collaboration on a book to encourage girls in math, science and technology.

With so much more potential for the Beacon Street Girls, Swartz says, “Like any entrepreneur, I have too much to do and not enough hours in the day.”