#7 The Joy of Many Failures – Last Lemon

August 16, 2024

In the Seychelles in 1998, we wrote a Harold’s Planet story called The Last Lemon.

In it, a man guards the lemons on his tree, unintentionally attracting many thieves who steal almost all the fruit. He saves the last lemon to grow a new tree, but then nearly suffocates the sapling with an excess of care. The young tree’s only hope of survival is if the guard abandons his mission completely…

After our Seychelles and Paris adventures, we returned to London in 1999 and set up a licensing company – Last Lemon Productions. It has been the home for our shared creative projects, and our devotion has borne many colourful, unusual and yummy fruit.

We named it after the story, and because we liked the sound of the words (and the taste of lemons) rather than for some deep connection with the moral – though the years have proven it not un-relevant to Last Lemon’s own cycles…

The way you run a creative studio in the licensing world is to show, and hope to license, your creations at trade shows.
We never quite fitted in but we always made an impression.

Ralph and I have lost count of the times we’ve been told – this project is “the BIG one” or “perhaps you should be planning tax-efficient vehicles offshore for your imminent riches”…

Instead, we have had what we (really) like to call The Joy of Many Failures. Not total failures, and not just joy either. Enough success to live out many of our dreams, but not enough to ever really relax and stop thinking about the next move, the next innovation. We’re still looking after the lemon tree! But it’s still bearing fruit!

This week, I’ve chosen some of my favourite Last Lemon projects to share, a mix of successes and failures that may make you a bit dizzy and have certainly kept us on our toes.

Happiness is… | Bea + Mila reading Smories | Emma and me at Nek Chand’s Sculpture Garden in Chandigarh, India

1. Vimrod (2003 – 2014)
Vimrod was a daily cartoon. Many would count his popularity in greeting cards as a success, and it certainly was a groundbreaking card range. Vimrod was the original meme artist (and ALL ORIGINAL!).

If only the CEO of the the biggest gift shop chain in the UK, who’d just commissioned a massive range of Vimrod products, had not uttered the immortal, hubristic words:

“I wouldn’t go out and buy a yacht just yet, buuuuut…. (knowing look, little wink)

Weeks later we’d be unceremoniously dumped, for reasons too boring to mention. Though I’ve never been very good at expectations management, honestly I savour the anticipation much more than I get discouraged by the disappointment, so that works for me.

The funniest cartoons (imho) never made it into the public realm. This was inevitable – as we soon realised that if I thought a cartoon was hilarious/brilliant, it was pretty much guaranteed to fail commercially, so we’d never choose my faves for publication. Happy to be of help!

Anyway, you’re my peeps (though we’re a small tribe, hence lack of yacht to date) so you will probably agree that the three cartoons below are damn funny.

2. Blessthischick Avatar Generator (2006)
When the Internet was born, we noticed that people’s online names were adorable and so original. One of the cutest names was blessthischick! So we (long story short) made a web machine called blessthischick, for people to create their avatars of their online names.

Thousands of people around the world started using the machine, we had venture capitalists ready to invest, illustrators around the world ready to work on Blessthischick, we did a merchandising deal with one of the UK’s coolest toy companies. Toys, bags, USB sticks…all came to naught. And that’s not even the saddest failure…

3. smories (2010)
Smories was a project Ralph and I dreamed up on a long car ride in Botswana. It’s USP was original stories for kids, read by kids. We asked writers to enter their small stories (smories) into a monthly online competition. We recorded our young daughters, nieces, nephews and all their friends reading the stories in their adorable British accents and sometimes halting, sometimes exuberant reading styles. It was quite brilliant fun.

With our long-time friend and sometime musical/technical collaborator Tom Dyson, we met with Puffin Books and Californian/Canadian production companies to take it to the next level. But though the smories competition was a roaring success, there was just no real traction on the video-watching. The stories were perhaps not quite riveting enough, too long for the quick-fix screen culture, and perhaps parents had not yet caved in to screen domination. Perhaps the world is ready now??

So many gorgeous smory-tellers…

4. Me Without You (2013)
Yay! This one was not a failure! In fact, we had no high hopes for this little book but it turned out to be a New York Times bestseller (also a song and a delightful animation.) Ha!

It started with a text I wrote to my friend Emma, missing her after our trip to India in 2009.

“Me without you…
is like sky without blue”

She texted back “…like cow without moo..”
I replied “…like sneeze without atchoo”…

Ralph and I made a little book of it and now over half a million copies have been sold.
An illustrated version of the backstory can be seen here.

5. My Little Animals (2013)
Beginning: Ralph wrote some short children’s stories, somewhere between the alarming cautionary tales of Struwwelpeter and the delightful simplicity of Mr. Men.
Middle: The titles and covers alone should have guaranteed success.
End: But they did not.

6. Happiness is… (2013)
We got the idea for “Happiness is…” sitting in that most happy of places, our Californian hot-tub.
Earlier in the day I’d replied to ALL of the emails in my inbox. “Happiness is… an empty inbox” I said, and Ralph said “And happiness is…getting into a hot-tub”. So then we started to list things that made us happy. The original idea was to ask people on Facebook “What makes YOU happy?” and for Ralph to illustrate the ideas he liked best.

It started as a few submissions a day, and within a few days it was in the hundreds. Six months later we had over two million followers on Facebook from all around the world.

The common thread was the appreciation of the simple lovely moments in life. Bare feet on fresh grass… singing loudly when no one can hear… finding matching socks in the laundry pile… feeling the warm sun on your skin.

A few months later we had an 8 book deal with Chronicle Books in San Francisco. I’d been sending my truly terrible book ideas to Chronicle since my student days, so to work with them was a dream come true. And indeed, the books have been translated into lots of languages and brought, as you would expect, happiness to millions. It has especially struck a chord in India, where Happiness is… has appeared on billboards above motorways all over the country and Happiness products have been selling in the best department stores for more than ten years now!

7. Harold’s Planet – Yoga for Winelovers (2015)
We got the amazing animator Norm Konyu to make a series of Harold’s Planet animations and Tom Dyson to compose/produce the wonderful music. The most popular by far was “Yoga for Winelovers”. But it got pirated and so, whilst maybe everyone in the world has seen it (I think love of wine + love of yoga, between them, covers the recreational lives of most humans) we have never seen a cent. Still, wine and yoga are their own rewards (though cash works for me every time, too).

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