Harald Lou
Bill

How do you get children excited about stories? That's the question Dolores Kohl asked more than a decade ago, and the answer she came up with is StoryBus, a children's museum on wheels that travels to preschool and kindergarten classrooms across the Chicagoland area. We help manage that program, as well as the Dolores Kohl Education Foundation's annual Kohl Education Prize.

We've been visiting Mexico since 2008, and have made friends with mezcaleros in some of the rural communities surrounding Oaxaca. They asked us to help them build a library, which is well on its way, and to develop a program to replant maguey (agave) in the wild. That has since turned into a nonprofit we registered as a 501c3 in 2017. If you're interested in learning more, visit SACRED: Saving Agave for Culture, Recreation, Education, and Development.And you'll also want to check out Agave Road Trip, our podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico.

SitStayRead brings dogs into Chicago classrooms to help struggling young readers develop critical early literacy skills. In May 2014, Ten Angry Pitbulls was brought in to help that organization stabilize funding. Three consecutive years of losses had put the non-profit at risk of financial insecurity. By leading the board, staff, and a large team of committed supporters, Ten Angry Pitbulls effectuated a financial turnaround — the organization concluded its next fiscal year with $140,000 in revenues above expenses, more than making up for the losses of the three previous years. At the same time, the organization served more students than ever before, while lowering the cost per student. Ten Angry Pitbulls' Lou Bank concluded his project with SitStayRead after the first six months of FY2016, leaving the organization with its biggest first-half revenues ever — revenues that, in fact, almost matched the organization's revenues for the entire fiscal year prior to bringing us in.

Have you ever read a book you loved and wished you had something that told people you love that book? I mean, you can't carry the book around all the time, right? With that in mind, we created a line of T-shirts featuring fictional businesses from popular novels. Click here to read how we gave readers of Andrew Vachss, Nick Hornby, Chuck Klosterman, Dennis Lehane, and Charles de Lint a way to wear their favorite authors proudly!

If you're one of those Andrew Vachss readers, you'll probably also be interested in how we developed a soundtrack featuring the music he writes about in his books, and how we took his first, never-before-published novel, A Bomb Built in Hell, and made it the world's second big ebook deal. (Stephen King beat us by a couple months ... so sue me.)

Another project readers will want to check out: The Orbit, the website we built and manage for Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale.

Books aren't your thing? More of a comics guy? We saw a phenomenon coming before the rest of the world, and helped Viz bring their Pokemon comics to the mass-market in the US. And when The Jim Henson Company asked us for help getting their TV series "Farscape" written up in TV Guide, we instead sold the magazine a two-page comics strip introducing the s-f series. (What? People pay for advertising? Crazy.)

Or read all about Googa Doc Pomus Ale, a limited-edition beer poured at the Great GoogaMooga Festival in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

So what can we do to help you market your product? I don't know. What's your product?