Jeremy Weil is stepping down from his role at the Economist to focus on his colouring-books start-up – Paul Grover for The Telegraph
I’ve wanted to run my own business for as long as I can remember. Even at the age of five, I would print out little mock business cards with “consultant” on them. But while I’ve spent the last 15 or so years 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 is until now. I’ve called time on life in the office to commit myself fully to Colour Your Streets, the start-up I founded with my wife, the broadcaster Emma Barnett, a year ago. To do this, I’m giving up a six-figure job at The Economist’s intelligence unit, where I was head of product. Before that I worked for the likes of Reed Business Information and Deloitte.
People say the UK isn’t great for entrepreneurship any more, but that hasn’t been my experience – although there are certain things I haven’t been trying to do, such as raising money. What I can say is that there have been very few barriers to getting going, and there are so many fantastic tools available.
I had to leave my job because what started as a spark of an idea had become a full-time job in itself.
In 2023, Emma and I were on shared maternity and paternity leave. Our five-year-old had developed a taste for colouring-in books and, to keep him entertained, we wanted to find one that would allow him to colour in pictures of the local area – Herne Hill in south London. We were surprised to find that nothing like that existed, so we set out to make one ourselves.
Jeremy Weil started Colour Your Streets so his five-year-old could colour in pictures of their local area – Colour Your Streets
At the time there was no expectation that this idea would end up taking over our lives. I began by taking some pictures of the neighbourhood on my phone, then used AI to generate book templates. I got a first attempt at a book printed, but I knew nothing at the time about paper quality or anything like that.
Still, it was exciting, seeing the idea come to life for little more than a couple of hundred pounds.
We no longer use AI – these days we work with a handful of designers – but at the very start it was a brilliant and effective tool. You can ask it to suggest a colour palette for a child-focused brand and it will give you great suggestions. This was especially helpful considering that I’m colourblind.
I was convinced that we were onto something special. We created a second run of books, widening out the areas we covered, and started showing them to friends and their children. There was an immediate positive reaction, especially among the children. When you show something to a five or six-year-old, you will know immediately whether they like it or not. They don’t hide their reactions – they’re brutal. It was interesting to see how immediately they connected with their areas and the buildings and landmarks, even things as simple and unassuming as a bench that they had sat on outside the station. It meant so much more to them than something generic.
Next, we started thinking about getting them stocked in shops. Our local gift shop loved them and took them straight away – there’s nothing more exciting than your very first sale. But that was just the beginning of an avalanche. Wherever we went, people said yes, because they love their areas.
Remarkably, we’ve found that all sorts of age groups are now using and buying our products, having initially thought that it would very much be for five, six and seven-year-olds. In fact, we get a lot of adults who really enjoy it. Often people are buying the books because of nostalgia. For instance, I had one woman from New Zealand contact me about a Clapham and Battersea book. She had lived in the area 35 years ago and wanted to see the buildings there again. And this was all early on in the journey. We could feel it gathering pace.
Parting ways with my corporate job wasn’t a big, dramatic exit, nor was giving up the salary it offered. Quite simply I realised that I almost couldn’t stay, because the demands of the colouring book business had become so great. In a very short space of time we had gone from a kitchen table business, where we were doing all the fulfilment, printing shipping labels and taking books to the post office, to using a warehouse and outsourcing our customer support.
Now we’re on course to turn over between £2m and £4m next year, which I think is reasonably achievable. We’ve created around 150 books for neighbourhoods all across the UK and even launched some international ones for cities like New York, Paris and Barcelona.
Starting a business always carries with it some risk. But I think the way we did it – with me continuing to have a job while we got it off the ground – has de-risked the whole project from a financial perspective. It’s a different thing if you go from a stable, monthly job to a business that isn’t making revenue or growing.
That’s not to say we haven’t faced challenges. When it’s your own business, there is always more work to be done. You don’t ever want to say that something can wait until tomorrow – it’s endless. You have to learn how to focus on strategic things that are really going to make a difference, rather than spending your time buried in a mountain of emails.
Because Emma and I are working together, we also have to make sure that it doesn’t totally consume our lives, and that we remember we are primarily husband and wife, not just business partners. There have been times in the last year where we’ve definitely veered too much towards that but that’s because we’re both so excited by it. Our skills complement each other: she is brilliant at anything to do with PR and the brand, and the visual design of the products, while I’m much more focused on the operations of the business, creating new books, building the website and improving our metrics.
The lack of bureaucracy is amazing. Working a corporate job, you have to think in terms of communications and stakeholders and all that stuff. Now we make decisions really fast.
To someone thinking of taking the plunge and starting their own business, I would say just do it. The thing that I find typically separates entrepreneurs from others is that they take the jump from idea to reality, however small it might be. You can test a lot of ideas with almost no money – it just takes time and dedication.
Jeremy Weil is the founder of Colour Your Streets. As told to Daniel Woolfson.
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