Grumbalina
Grumbalina is a six-book children's series written by Karina Frederiks and illustrated by Dan Abdo, brought to market through Daddy The Agency and shipped across seven European countries by Black Label UK. I led print production and multi-agency facilitation: the discipline that turns beautiful artwork into a physical product that survives international retail.
Independent children's authors face a real production gap. They can write the story and commission the artwork, but turning that into a printed series, delivered across borders, marketed coherently, displayed at trade shows, is a separate discipline with its own technical and logistical demands. That gap was my job.
The challenge
The setup was genuinely international: Karina based between the Netherlands and Canada, Daddy The Agency in Portugal, Black Label UK in the United Kingdom, and Dan Abdo's illustration work threading it all together. Four countries, two continents, one series that had to feel like a single coherent world at the end of it.
The books themselves arrived built for the wrong market. Layouts were formatted to US sizing and created in RGB: fine on a monitor, wrong for a UK press. Every page needed restructuring for UK print specifications and reprofiling for CMYK without losing the colour intensity that made the illustrations work. One conversion error and a warm palette turns muddy across an entire run, six times over.
And the brand had to travel beyond the book. Stickers, maps, apparel and digital assets, each one adapting the same artwork to a different substrate with different tolerances. Fabric doesn't behave like gloss paper. A sticker die-cut doesn't forgive like a full-bleed spread. Every application needed the Grumbalina world to stay consistent while the medium underneath it changed.
The challenge
A complete production pass on all six books: UK sizing, CMYK reprofiling, page-by-page proofing of pagination, alignment and image fidelity, and gloss stock selected deliberately to push the cartoon-inspired artwork as close to screen vibrancy as paper allows. Dan designed the book; my job was to make sure it could actually be printed, properly, six times over.
Around the books, I refined the Grumbalina logo, extended the identity across the collateral suite in close collaboration with Frederiks and Abdo, designed the tradeshow pieces surrounding each launch, made amendments to the online store, and organised printing and international shipping across all seven markets, coordinating fulfilment and distribution partners throughout. Daddy The Agency ran the influencer marketing and press; I supported as production lead, making sure the assets they needed existed when they needed them, including promotional bundles of books, stickers and branded clothing sent to influencers, celebrities and media outlets.
The solution
- 6 books delivered to spec across the full series
- 7 European countries reached: UK, Spain, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Germany and Italy
- Stocked by Waterstones and independent bookstores across the UK
- Adopted by schools across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire as a creative resource for children learning English
- National press and social coverage, including The Sun, driven by promotional bundles built from the extended brand system
- A transatlantic partnership held together across 4 countries and 2 continents: production (Black Label UK), marketing and PR (Daddy The Agency), and the creative team of Frederiks and Abdo
An honest note: this was early in my international publishing experience and I didn't track sales figures at the time. A lesson I've carried into every project since; the measurement discipline in DigiBrief and Print-a-Tree exists directly because of it. What stands: the books shipped, the launches happened, and six children's books exist in seven European countries because the production side held together.
Grumbalina is in the portfolio because production leadership matters. Plenty of brilliant creative work never reaches an audience because nobody held the operational side together. The best projects need both: the people who imagine it, and the people who ship it.
