Business Spotlight: Creative 3 LLC

Owners: Terri Johnson, Sherry Cook and Jesse Kuhn

Founded: 2004

Address: 2236 E. Spring Hill Road, Springfield, MO 65804

Phone: (417) 882-2145

Fax: (417) 882-2145

Web site: www.quirkles.com

E-mail(s): terri.johnson@quirkles.com, sherry.cook@quirkles.com

Products: The Quirkles materials, including educational booklets, teacher guides, posters and coloring books

Employees: 3

Ollie Oxygen was the first Quirkle to graduate to a story booklet, but Colorful Caroline and Density Dan weren’t far behind.

Quirkles – quirky, illustrated characters associated with a letter of the alphabet and a scientific principle – are the brainchild of partners Terri Johnson, Sherry Cook and Jesse Kuhn, a trio doing business as Creative 3 LLC.

Johnson is an educator with 17 years of teaching experience and owner of Fiction, Facts & Fun LLC, an educational enrichment program she runs out of a brightly colored space in the French Quarter Plaza on East Republic Road.

Cook, a marketing instructor at Missouri State University, is Johnson’s sister and owner of People as Resources Consulting, a firm that specializes in strategic planning, marketing and human resource development.

And Kuhn is an illustrator and graphic designer who took one of Cook’s classes at MSU before graduating in 2004 and moving to St. Louis.

Educational truisms

Johnson says the idea for Quirkles was born from the educational truism that young children have an “innate love for science.” Harnessing that affinity and melding it with phonics – the practice of associating letters with the speech sounds they represent – was the winning combo for Creative 3.

“What I found was that traditional teaching methods just did not seem to be cutting it,” Johnson says. “(My students) were bored. They lacked the excitement I was hoping to get from them, especially in the area of reading. But I noticed when I started incorporating the science piece with the reading, they started getting excited.”

Take Gilbert Gas, for example. Cook says the Quirkle character is a “perennial favorite,” whose booklet teaches kids about atmospheric gases and their properties, which are brought to life in an experiment involving a film canister and an antacid tablet.

In addition to jazzing up the fundamentals of literacy, the Quirkles approach is sowing the scientific seed in young minds, Cook notes.

“Research will suggest that most traditional educational settings don’t really start working with (science) seriously until about third grade, and by fourth (grade), students are saying they don’t like it,” she adds. “Maybe this is the greatest marketing job I’ll ever do – trying to put a new face on science.”

Hands-on fun and visual stimulation are the essence of Quirkles, and Kuhn single-handedly designed the unique characters turning up in classrooms throughout the country.

“For me, (the goal) was to create something that was going to be extremely memorable and exciting and a tool that would allow learning to be fun for kids,” he recalls. “So I approached it from a wacky, goofy, lopsided proportion type of way.”

The result was a motley crew of 26 characters, each with their own name and personality traits. Kuhn illustrated 32-page booklets for each Quirkle, and a host of Quirkle materials now includes posters, a coloring book and a teacher’s guide.

Building a brand

In December, Creative 3 inked a licensing and distribution agreement with Dallas-based Frog Street Press Inc. Frog Street markets the Quirkles line to educational specialty stores, educational toy stores and schools. Customers in Missouri, Texas, Arkansas and Kansas account for most of the business, but Quirkles materials also have done well in the Northeast, Cook says.

Locally, Quirkles booklets and teacher guides are available at Gold Minds and Gizmos Gadgets & More at The Discovery Center. Steven Diullo, who owns both stores, says the products have been well received by “everybody from teachers to home-schooling parents.”

For instance, one parent is purchasing the Quirkles booklets, which retail for $9.99, one letter at a time, Diullo says.

“The top seller is T, the tornado, Timothy Tornado,” he says, adding that customers have embraced the Quirkles approach.

“They like the idea of combining the phonics with the science, and the experiments are well-done,” Diullo adds.

New products on the horizon could include a music book, a book with additional activities and experiments, and an interactive DVD.

“The rate of success for new products is very small,” Cook says. “You’ve got to be able to sell it.”

Cook says sales have steadily increased since the product line was launched in April 2006, but she didn’t have an estimate for 2007 revenue.

Provided the growth trend continues, she says 2008 revenue could reach $250,000.

“I think that’s a realistic goal,” Cook adds. “After that, I’m not sure.”

Naming the Quirkles

“We always called them these quirky little characters, and I thought of Quirkles,” says Sherry Cook, the one-woman marketing department for Creative 3 LLC. “I remember sitting at the computer and doing a Google search immediately … and going to the dictionary to see if that was a word. It was sort of there in front of us all the time, but I would say we had about three or four rounds of brainstorming before it came to us.”[[In-content Ad]]