Sammy Satsuma is a cheerful orange skinned kid. He goes to school and has adventures along with friends like Billy Brussel, Carla Cucumber and Romesh Rhubarb. He is the hero of a couple of traditional children’s story books and also stars, along with the child reading it, in two personalised books to date. There is a growing range of other personalised printed items and most importantly, a customisable cook book featuring the other relatable food choice characters, ie Sammy’s friends, which is intended to help kids make healthy food choices.
The fathers of these characters – and having two fathers is so twenty-first century – are Chris Brady and Ashley Cain, each with young children of their own. The friends were supping drinks in the Goffs Oak pub in Waltham Cross, chatting about what their respective offspring were eating and the influence that relentless advertising from food manufacturers has on their diet, specifically how much hard work it was to get them to eat what their parents want.
Cain is managing director of a local removals business turned children’s author. Brady is managing director of Print4UK in Enfield. Cain would write a book to encourage healthy eating, Brady would print them. Sammy Satsuma was born. That initial conversation was followed by others as the idea evolved from straightforward story books to interactive personalised stories and an enlarged troupe of characters, representing the fruit and vegetables that kids should be eating more often.
“We were having a drink on a Thursday evening and by Saturday, we had started to evolve the characters,” says Cain.
Five years on from that drink and with the hassles of lockdown fading, the Sammy Satsuma website has been designed, tested and is open for business. Sammy Satsuma now has his own registered business with additional funding from a third member of the team. In short, the adventures of Sammy and friends are just beginning.
The concept of a cook book was always central to the brand concept, but creating the necessary recipes was well away from the fathers’ comfort zone. Jo Pratt, a well known cook who has worked with the likes of Gary Rhodes, Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver as well as making television appearances, was approached and says she was delighted to come on board to produce the recipes and to be an ambassador for Sammy and Co.
The cookbook is what distinguishes this project from other personalised stories that all owe a debt to Lost My Name, the original personalised child’s story and still best known of the genre. The idea here is that the child, or his or her parents, pick the ten recipes that they like from a selection in the portfolio that Jo Pratt has written and tested as suitable for primary school age children. And she would not have agreed to be associated with it had she felt it to be nothing more than a short lived gimmick.
“We were researching the market to find a chef whose work and profile matched our mission and aspirations and came across Jo. We contacted her agent, which led to a Zoom meeting and after a few chats, exchanging ideas back and forth, we were excited when she decided to come on board. She adds knowledge and experience that greatly enhances the project,” says Cain.
A new set of illustrations was commissioned to give the characters more rounded and polished personalities with that illustrator now on board full time.
Behind the scenes, the project also needed technology to develop the portal and to capture the choices made via the portal into physical form. The team was struggling, says Brady. The software provider initially selected could not deliver what was needed. Six months out from the planned launch, Brady approached Infigo. Its CEO Douglas Gibson quickly bought into the concept and the ideas behind it. He quickly committed Infigo to piecing together the solution. “We had tried another route which did not work out,” says Brady. “Then I remember having worked with Douglas when the Infigo technology was in its infancy and at the time was still part of Bytes.”
Gibson was engaged by the goal of improving nutrition for school age kids and jumped at the opportunity. Infigo is rapidly acquiring an altruistic culture, raising money for Ukraine through individual efforts just the latest venture to install a sense of purpose.
“I have three young children so when I first met Chris and shared the concept with my children they got interested very, very quickly thanks to the strong graphic element to the design.
“And that nutrition aspect is really interesting from the Infigo point of view, much more interesting than just producing personalised books,” he says. “We are trying to have a beneficial impact with the end user.”
The project was story boarded to understand what would be required and how to engage website visitors, their journey to check out and what they would need to do along the way. The user interface for the website was created and checked with very knowledgeable people, namely the Cain crew and Brady bunch as well as the children of friends. This gathered feedback on what was liked and what wasn’t, what was clear, what was confusing and silly, what worked and what didn’t.
The child’s name becomes part of the story as does an avatar character based on choices made on the portal: boy or girl, colour and style of hair, glasses or freckles – or none. This is the representative for the reader and is vital to the story. The avatar will appear on every page of the books, requiring almost on the fly creation of perhaps unique PDFs thanks to the individual choices made.
“The big hook is the way that youngsters identify and bond with the characters. They fall in love with them so the healthy eating message comes across better than if it is someone preaching to them,” says Cain. Testing this with the range of kids in the ad hoc focus group proved that Cain’s ideas were sound.
“We have undertaken extensive case studies with the children of friends and families and have got them to complete reviews and feedback sheets so we can understand their view of the products and the personalisation experience. As we all know, the personalisation market in the UK is growing at a phenomenal rate and we are excited to be bringing a new kind of personalisation, ie recipe books, to the market,” says Cain.
“We use a statistic from Sustain’s research in 2020 that showed that 91% believe that the characters children like have an influence on the food choices they make,” he says. This is the sort of persuasion needed for parents and grandparents to place the order for the book.
The website also includes information about the minerals and vitamins associated with the chosen vegetables, to demonstrate the benefits of their consumption. Once the choices are made, the Infigo engine generates a low res file of the finished book for display and online checking. Then once committed, Infigo generates the print ready PDF that is delivered to a hot folder for Print4UK to print the book on its HP Indigo.
Production of the cookbook is slightly different as the recipe element is to the fore. Each recipe is designed as a template across four pages and held in the cloud. Each book delivers ten recipes from the portfolio of 34 that have been tried and tested. More will follow as the project develops. Once chosen, the software arranges the pages in alphabetical sequence of recipes for output. Job tickets, destination notes and tracking barcodes are automatically generated for each product. Each of the personalised story books will also have one recipe from the library at the back of the book.
The possible combinations of recipes effectively means that each book is either unique or at worst one in a thousand. Add in the possible permutations of how the avatar character looks, and the number of possible variations becomes endless.
“We used some off the shelf book production software,” says Gibson. “Then applied further coding to make interaction easier. There was some custom configuration required to handle the illustrations and artwork. The artwork had all been hand drawn, so we needed to get these new versions into InDesign and then into Infigo. Everything also needed to work in a mobile environment, making this quite complex.
“We were able to leverage some existing technology to accelerate the process of getting to market, effectively completing this in just under six months,” says Gibson. “We will now continue to evolve the site, adding some polish. There are some clear ideas for the future directions.”
There are sophisticated rules behind the site that create the avatar and link it to the customer and to the story. These can be made more sophisticated for future releases and publications if needs be. And the site itself will be tweaked according to reactions from the users.
“We will take account of feedback and evaluation as we go to market and find out what the consumer wants,” says Gibson. The site has a strong graphic element to it, making this very different to the highly functional website that Infigo is perhaps more used to its customers working with.
There will inevitably be further tweaks needed as further spin off products are added. The website already includes activity sheets to be downloaded and again hammering home the healthy eating message.
The online shop offers the books, Sammy Satsuma cooking utensils suitable for use by youngsters and the choice of a personalised jigsaw, again including a name and avatar for a unique package. These will be printed to order by Print4UK and will then be cut out on the PFI Blade B2 cutting table installed by Duplo in 2021. There are a number of scenes to select from and three levels of difficulty via the number of pieces in the puzzle.
Print4UK has the finishing equipment to cope with levels of demand for the simple stitched books and wire bound recipe books. The first adventure story books are PUR bound though there was special case bound version for Christmas which was finished elsewhere. If demand builds ahead of the next Christmas rush, case binding in house is not out of the question, says Brady.
Now Sammy is out on the streets, his adventures really begin, and far from dying down the operation is ramping up its activities. “We are talking to a company that can help us with digital support,” says Brady. And a PR/marketing business is reaching out to mainstream media to explore different angles to promote Sammy’s story, which is where the celebrity chef will help because her involvement provides a way in to the story. These conversations include television, magazines for both lifestyle and cookery sections and for the gift ideas sections and websites. “Combining Jo’s story with the two dads makes an interesting human tale,” he says. There are further angles to explore and doors to open. “We have been talking with HP,” says Brady, “about ways that we might globalise this.”
And for Print4UK these angles include other styles of personalised book – it had been producing memory books before Sammy came along. More Sammy titles are a certainty, including one aimed children at the preschool early learning stage.
That relaxed pub conversation was seven years ago now, says Brady. It has taken that time to create the framework and understand the technology, starting slowly and gathering pace in the last couple of years. Seven years from now, who knows where Sammy and his friends might be?
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