The Germany Expat Business Show
A podcast that shares knowledge, stories and inspiration for anyone starting, running or growing a business as a non-German in Germany.
The Germany Expat Business Show
Diversity, Children’s Products & E-commerce with Peter & May, Berlin Founders of Kidsimply
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In this episode I talk to May and Peter Kamya, the Berlin-based founders of Kidsimply. Peter is originally from the UK and May’s family immigrated to Germany from Thailand when she was five years old.
Kidsimply is an online shop selling diverse and inclusive books and toys. Through the KidSimply brand, and inspired by raising their child, Peter and May want to celebrate cultural diversity, but most importantly send out a message to ALL children that their experiences matter.
In this episode of The Germany Expat Business Show we talked about:
💪 How ‘learning by doing’ is part and parcel of starting a business
📱Working with influencers to spread the word
📦 How Peter and May approach order fulfilment and stocking inventory
💕 Balancing values and mission with brass tacks business outcomes
⬅️ What to outsource and what to keep in house
💁♀️ The value of getting to know customers and their community and in-person markets
🏪 Staying online vs. opening a brick and mortar shop
🛒 Their experience using both WooCommerce and Shopify
🫶 How they navigate being partners in both life and business
✏️ Using translation tools in combination with manual translation, writing and editing
📥 Their experiences with founding a Ltd. in the UK and a GmbH in Germany, including impacts on cash flow
🇩🇪Their hope to one day expand to markets in Köln, Hamburg and other cities in Germany.
Visit and follow Kidsimply here:
Kidsimply.de website
Kidsimply on Instagram
Kidsimply on Tiktok
You can find this episode and all episodes as well as show notes for each at https://thegermanylist.de/the-germany-expat-business-show-podcast/
Starting or running a business in Germany as a foreigner? Already running an online business in Germany as an expat? Wanting to grow your German-based business? Working as a freelancer in Germany? You'll love my guide with over 30 resources for expat business owners in Germany.
Hi, I'm Eleanor Meyerhofer, a native Californian designer and digital strategist. In October of 1999, a few years after graduating from design school, I flew from San Francisco to Munich with a fistful of Deutschmarks, a dial-up connection and an extremely vague plan. Twenty-plus years later, after a 10-year stint at a global agency agency freelancing and launching two online businesses, I'm still here Now I'm talking to other expat business owners to share knowledge, stories and inspiration for other non-Germans running businesses in Germany. So I am here with Peter and May Kamyat and I was just telling them in the green room that I discovered them through the migrant accelerator after I had interviewed Lila Zohaib and I'm going to start Peter and May with the same two questions I ask everybody at the beginning of this podcast, which is can you tell me the two minute story of how you ended up in Germany?
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, I ended up in Germany. Hi everyone, I ended up in Germany. For me, it was a decision I made for our family, because my wife's family already are based here. I don't have my mother with me, so I wanted my daughter to grow up with grandparents and close family relatives. So that was our decision to to move here.
Speaker 1:Okay and May.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I left Berlin after A-levels and I went to study in London where I then met Peter. We had a daughter. I actually had started a company in the UK myself, so I became self-employed, but that was in the tourism business and then work was just so busy. But that was in the tourism business and then work was just so busy. We had obviously no village to raise a child, so and traveling was part of our job traveling a lot on my job, at least.
Speaker 3:Back then peter hadn't joined me yet and, yeah, when he it was never my, I wanted to come back. Eventually I wanted to come back to Berlin because my mom is here, my sisters are here, but for me it wasn't a must because my life had continued in the UK. I built up a foundation there, I had my family there and I never wanted to force going back again. So it had to be a decision made by Pete that he was ready to go and he did that. And when he did that, yeah I was pretty surprised and took us about less than a year, I think, to prepare everything. And then we up and left and came to Germany.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I guess I should go back and say yes, you are based in Berlin and May you mentioned your family's there, so can you explain a little bit about your background and when you got to?
Speaker 3:Germany. I was five years old. My mother was a first generation immigrant and she brought me first because I was so young, and left two daughters back in Thailand. She prepared everything and then, when she was ready, she brought the other two along. In that period she had another daughter, so now we were four, four girls. And yeah, and then I was just raised here, went to school, school. Everybody else went to school, all my other siblings went to school, and when I reached A-levels I wanted a more international job and environment, so I left to London.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you are kind of German. I mean, you grew up here, you can speak German, so you have like an unfair advantage from a lot of that.
Speaker 2:That's true, yes, that's a regular conversation we have and the challenge that makes our decision of staying here harder being able to navigate through the language navigate through the language.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, which okay, so let's talk about your business, which is kids. Simply because I do have some questions about what it is and why it's in german, so why don't you tell us a little bit about so?
Speaker 2:2020 was a very pivotal moment for all of us and that around the time of where the george floyd killing happened were raising and we are raising a biracial child and we've both experienced racism, but in different ways. So we had those conversations of our journey for racism and we kind of were like saying to each other we need to be the change that we want to see, because our daughter's going to be asking us questions what have you been doing? And we know for me, I've lived in the UK for so long and the UK, or London in particular, is so diverse, but, living in Germany, you definitely feel that you are the minority. It works, even in Berlin. We actually live on the east side of Berlin, which is still progressive. But, yeah, it exists and the problem is there and it does weigh you down at some point.
Speaker 2:So then we decided that we needed to do something and that's why Kid Simply came across. Kid Simply was a concept for us to celebrate the beauty of diversity. So in the books and the toys that we we're selling, we wanted to make sure that we are celebrating that aspect of it and our daughter can feel celebrated because imagine that we're selling. We wanted to make sure that we are celebrating that aspect of it and our daughter can feel celebrated because, imagine, she brought it to our awareness and at the time she was still very young that all the stuff that she saw, particularly on Disney, didn't reflect her. It was long blonde hair, as light as possible, and it saddened her why her hair wasn't straight or why her face wasn't pale enough. And for us we didn't have the questions there, but we thought for our shop we'll have the questions to find products that look like her and reflect her.
Speaker 1:So talk about some of the products you have in the shop.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have dolls with different skin colors. We have books that discuss certain topics. We have books that definitely show our children to represent them. So we have inclusive books as well. So it's really a broad selection of things where kids can feel represented, really a broad selection of things where kids can feel represented. It's also tailored to you know, we don't just look at diversity and inclusion, but we also look at the environment as a whole, because in the end, we are leaving a world for our kids, right? And how do we want to leave that world? So sustainability is a factor for us.
Speaker 3:I've just got so fed up with plastic toys as well, and it just piles up and piles up. And where does that all go? I mean, you can pass it on to other people, yes, sure, but at some point it still piles up somewhere. And if it's not here in the first world, it will pile up in a different area. So, reducing that, reducing the CO2 footprint where all these things come from.
Speaker 3:Of course, when we look at diversity and inclusion, there are still certain toys that we have that, yeah, they are still produced as plastic, like the dolls that we have. They are still plastic. Yeah, they are still produced as plastic, like the dolls that we have. They are still plastic. But then they tick another box where we think it's still important and valuable for us to sell those toys because it just encourages the kids right With toys that either look like them or even don't look like them right, toys that either look like them or even don't look like them right.
Speaker 3:So there are still kids here and we do have a good support of communities where you know they may not have that diversity in their surrounding, but there are parents there or Kitas in schools there that want to be prepared and they want, you know, buy the books that look that are more diverse, or toys to let their children play with something that they see when they grow up, but necessarily they don't grow up with this right now. So it's both ways. It's definitely trying to reach a younger audience before they're in touch with racism or other topics.
Speaker 2:I think to go more into it, so this can kind of relate to what we're doing. So in between that time I also became one of the co-founders of a group called Black Dads Germany and the concept was to try and change the narrative, the negative narrative that's often portrayed for black fathers as absentee fathers not present. We did a lot of participation with our children, so we'll create play dates where we all meet. We did workshops with our children, whether it's cooking workshops, you know, reading, hair workshops, and what was apparent is that everybody has the same experiences that children still experiences in the literature that are being read in schools. They still use the n-word and there are games that pre-exist in european areas. There's a game particular that portrays in in a negative context the color black or black individual the game that one of our brands produced, where it kind of changed the narrative and portrayed a more cosmopolitan society. And when we talk about diversity we're trying not to make it a black and white aspect, it's more. Diversity has to cover everything. So some of our books for example, we've got a book which is called Florian, a young child who's transitioning. We've got topic-based books where it's about separation and helping parents to communicate to their kids about separation and divorce, same-sex marriages, different ranges of families.
Speaker 2:And when we talk about our dolls, we've got dolls that cover, again, different aspects of diversity. We've got a new doll which has a Coachella hearing aid. We've got a pigment fragment, fragmentation, and we've been out in markets where people haven't realized that we actually what these dolls represent. They just see a doll which has some fragmentations and then I understand what that is, but then we can tell them these are regular occurrences.
Speaker 2:We've got an albino doll, which some people may misunderstand. What kind of doll is it? But we're trying to show the different shades of black, that black is not just the colour, there's different ranges of it. And dolls with Down syndrome. Or we've even just recently got a wheelchair type of place set or alphabet braille for people who can't see visually impaired. So our products are to cover all the different aspects of what diversity is. All about normalizing differences and celebrating them rather than them being pointed out out, but people can just normalize it. So we're trying to be in there with the schools and the kitas because we know we're not the only individuals experiencing the challenges, challenges that are going on in society, with our child okay, let me pivot a little bit and talk about business, since you are targeting these issues.
Speaker 1:I was gonna ask you why you made the site in German, but now I understand me, since you effectively grew up in Germany. It's like makes more sense. But you know, you mentioned you have an albino doll, you're. You know all these kind of progressive ideas. E-commerce is a hard business and a lot of time it's like. To make it successful, it has to be at scale and these are not toys that are have a enormous market. So how have you tackled that? You mentioned schools and Kitas. Are you partnering with them to get your products in there, or how are you going about marketing?
Speaker 3:Yes, we don't partner with them, but we actually offer a discount to them.
Speaker 3:So, because obviously they can buy in bigger quantities, we offer at the moment 15% off, an order of 100 euros and upwards. We have a dedicated person now who's responsible for contacting these Kitas and schools and is the first point of contact when they try and reach out to us so they can recommend, they can. You know, they just have a go-to person and we actually offer to open up a pop-up shop in Kitas and schools. If they want to also combine this with a workshop about different topics whether that's diversity, inclusion or other topics we can find the right person. Sometimes we would do this, but we find it better to get a professional person to come and do these workshops along with us doing the pop-up shop, and that can be directed to parents, that can be directed to the staff that works with the children, or even with the children themselves and the parents, right. So that totally depends what kind of workshop they want to do and who they want to address, but we offer that, yeah and is that one of your main marketing strategies?
Speaker 1:or do you guys do seo and does that work for some of these very specific types of books and dolls like what? What is like your kind of overall marketing?
Speaker 3:yeah, for online you definitely always need seo, otherwise you're not visible. And we definitely really struggled in the first years because we had no idea like neither people and I we are um knowledgeable in e-commerce or it, and it was actually the pandemic, right. So we also didn't know how much money do we want to spend in this, like how much. We spent quite a lot in Google marketing because we didn't know it gave us some business but it wasn't enough to cover what we actually spent, and that was a bit ridiculous of us, but we didn't know any better.
Speaker 3:Everybody learning by doing and now we we put it all back Like we, we do only SEOs. We go out to markets, do a lot more social media and through communities, through word of mouth, through. That's bringing the people to our site.
Speaker 1:Okay, and in terms of inventory, I used to have an e-commerce shop but I was selling downloadables because I was so scared of having inventory and shipping and all of that. Do you guys have all the inventory at home somewhere? How does the whole supply work? Yeah?
Speaker 3:we stock everything somewhere, like how does the whole supply? Yeah, we stock everything. Our strategy is not to stock a lot, obviously because only a limited amount of space that we have. And we did actually speak to another what do you call it? Another place where we could stock our products. But they recommended to us back then and it was in the height of the pandemic where every business needed space.
Speaker 3:every business was making their money through online so we looked at fulfillment centers and we looked at local fulfillment centers. We looked through a chat with another businesswoman who was based in switzerland. She was working with people, disabled people, who would pack the products right and that's how this fulfillment center was specialized and I really liked the idea. I wanted that as well. But it's very hard to then change your products because you know those employees. They would need to kind of be trained in how you pack certain products.
Speaker 3:So your line has to stay the same. You know your products have to stay the same for most of the time and they just recommended to us look, just store it at home for now, try it out first, see what works and when you're ready, come back to us and we can start the fulfillment. And we've just, ever since we started, we keep on adding more products, we keep on experimenting and we can't seem to see that we can now, yeah, outsource it. It seems to be. It's better still with us, it's more personal. You know, we can leave a personal note in there, or it's also cheaper at the moment. So until we reach that amount of sales, I think we just have to keep it still in-house.
Speaker 1:You guys have a very mission-driven business. Do you ever run into conflicts with just the nature of business? And at the end of the day unless I'm assuming it's you would like to make a healthy profit and like reconciling your ideals with that just the nature of running a business Every day really.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the goal is definitely that the business can sustain itself with employees, you know, without us having to pump in money, basically, or getting investments from elsewhere. So that's not what we're about. I know we have been, at the beginning, trying to apply for certain grants, apply for certain competitions and loans and whatever Not loans.
Speaker 3:We just realized. Look, I think it's just a business that we want to grow slowly, as long as it can sustain itself, and it stays. You know, the philosophy stays with us and we serve a community that fully trusts us. We can be flexible, we can adapt, you know, whatever they need or tell us. You know certain problems they are facing. You know we can really tend to it and it's nice every time we go out to markets, because we do do markets as well. The markets help us to be in touch with the audience and actually get a firsthand reply about what they think and how they experience our products, what they would like and they then. That allows us to continue, you know, working on our products, working on the stock that we have and understanding our clientele.
Speaker 1:So real-time customer research?
Speaker 3:Exactly yes, we haven't opened up a shop yet. A lot of our customers are asking us for it, but we do have a main job. So KidSimply is not our only business. The tourism business is still there. Job so kids simply is not our only business. The tourism business is still there. And yeah, it's with just. I think this year we will come to a point where we have to make that decision.
Speaker 1:You know how do we want to grow both businesses further that's a lot of overhead to a physical space when you can have you know, an online business and have a room in your house with inventory and no rent and heating and people in the store. Let me ask you about that what e-commerce platform are you using?
Speaker 2:So we're currently using Shopify, which we initially we started with WordPress and, being that we're not both technical people, it just literally blew our minds. We didn't want to make those mistakes, so Shopify has been straightforward. We're still learning it. I'm sure there's more that we can use of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I used to sell on Etsy. I had a whole e-commerce. My first business was e-commerce and I used there's a French company called PresaShop and I finally landed at Shopify and I loved it so much. It was a long, hard journey finding that platform, especially for internationalization. They, in my view which is not exhaustive, but they have done the most work to really understand all the edge cases and taxes and all the EU and Germany rules. So, yeah, that's interesting to hear that you use both, cause I hear people I've never used WooCommerce but I had a WordPress site and was like, yeah, I'm not using that. I'm also curious so you're a couple, you're married with child. How, if you don't mind sharing, like, how do you, how do you divvy up the work of the business?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's a lot of compromising on both sides. It's. We are lucky enough to have that office in the house and we can. We have different rooms. We can always retreat to you know, if we don't like each other so much, we just go different places. We have a nice space outside to you know, go out to a park and whatever. I think it's important that, especially as you see each other 24-7, to have that space to go away from each other as well. But yeah, we fight every day. It's part of business.
Speaker 3:I think it's part of business, it's part of communication and if you don't fight, you don't know what's wrong with the other person and it's just normal. Tension builds up and there's no just smooth. It just doesn't happen and it's too boring for us as well.
Speaker 2:You also see the joys of it. I mean, some days when we have to go to market, our daughter's always with us. She's got the little, simply share, and she wants to be working like us and that makes us feel like, okay, we are doing the right thing. And you know, we actually test the products that we get on her If she likes them, because she's got a very short span. If she likes them, she gives us feedback and she sticks with it and she does that. But working together going back to your question and working together, this has been a learning curve for us Because, like May said earlier, I used to have a completely different career before us joining together.
Speaker 2:And then, when we did did we joined literally right bang in uh, covid times, you couldn't even go outside, it's just fun. But no, no shivers, no, no graze of that. Nothing was happening. We got along with.
Speaker 2:Communication has been the biggest advantage you know being able to communicate and understand one another and also know that the goals that we're both doing this for like, for example, kids Simply for us is a social project. It means very, very much to us in terms of its success, because every time we're running out of energy to doing two businesses, it just takes one market. You see people crying just because they love the products, because they've never seen themselves in those products.
Speaker 2:We come back with an urge of energy and in the other business, being able to travel to the destinations that we promote and coming back with you know just the idea that you're seeing different cultures. So we're both passionate about what we do and that's one key thing that's allowed us to work so well together. We both love, passionate about what we do, and that's one key thing that's allowed us to work so well together. We both love both businesses that we do.
Speaker 1:Are there some tasks that naturally fall to one person. So may I'm correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming you know you're the native German speaker in the relationship. So my guess would be you get all the fun projects of dealing with German bureaucracy and writing. Do you write all the product descriptions? Does that all fall to you Actually?
Speaker 3:not. Actually, there's so much to this business that you have to do in a written language. That does quite a lot of it, and luckily nowadays there's just translation apps.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 3:And they actually help me too, because in my other business I have to translate a lot from English to German. They just help me to translate faster. That's all Like. Sometimes I just run it through a translation, I look through it and I touch it up right. Obviously it's very hard sometimes to, you know, have a translation that matches well and but still, if it's like several pages that you have to translate, it's still a lot faster than having to do this by yourself and you're not a natural or a professional translator too, right? So I do most of the stuff.
Speaker 3:When it comes to, you know, working with bureaucracy, that's right, tax purposes and so on, but I'm also not professional in that like to be honest. I have my tax advisor and it's helped me a lot, and that through my other business. You know, working in the UK was so different. We had a limited company in the UK. I also set that up myself over there, and then when I, when we moved it over here, we had to change it totally, so I had to re-register as self-employed. It wasn't a different form of company yet. So you're still liable if you're self-employed under your name and that's how the other companies run.
Speaker 3:But then when we set up KidSimply, I asked my accountant and tax advisor what form of company should we choose? Choose, and the one that gives you the most respect in the market is gmbh. Right it because you do invest money into it, but you also have a lot of obligation with a gmbh. So it is not a cheap form of starting a company, but it's definitely a form that will gain your respect straight from the start, and we went for it. Yeah, I think that's. Now we're running those two One that is a GmbH but is still quite smallish and it's just a bit slow in, you know, in growing, but it's really successful. When you look at where we come from, you know in growing, but it's it's really successful. When you look at where we come from, you know, from the pandemic, and straight after the pandemic, online sales were dropping drastically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a lot of us had a sugar high in the pandemic, with online businesses thinking, well, this is easy. And then it's. It's like, oh, everybody's leaving their house and their computers and living life again, which is great. But so would you say business is easier, harder or just different between the uk and germany.
Speaker 3:Like being a business owner, it's quite hard I think in the uk it's faster to set something up. I mean, you can do it online literally set up a limited company and you as a person are not liable for it. Right, it's still your company. Over here it takes a bit longer, but again, definitely get good advice, get a good, you know tax advisor who will help you with the, with everything.
Speaker 3:Like my tax advisor is also a lawyer. He's a doctor, lawyer, accountant, and that really helped us in the pandemic too, because he knew certain things and he can fight the tax office as well. So you know, like he, he will help us whenever the tax office is still trying to be cheeky in getting certain amounts of money. He helped us into what you call it like having a break from paying taxes with my business because I lost all my clients. I lost all the tourism clients that I had before, right, and here in Germany you have to pay taxes in advance, like, like in the UK, you pay them afterwards. You pay them even a year later. In the meantime you could have put that money into a bank account and let the money work for you, but here they make you pay three in quarters and in, so that it's really hard with cash flow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I experienced that myself, Like it is just and just, when I started not making much and then, like all of a sudden, I had this huge tax bill and then oh, by the way, quarterly and then you get to points. You're like I'm just working, what's going on? But I'm hoping it all settles out, that I think it's a. Somebody once told me I'm probably going to say this in every episode Germany wants you to be an employee because it is just easier to have everything done for you, but we're going to fight that. So, in wrapping up, I would just like to ask you guys is there anything that you know now that you wish you knew when you had started, Especially running e-commerce?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, don't spend so much on Google ads at the beginning. Okay, know when you are ready and then spend it.
Speaker 2:Grow organically.
Speaker 3:As long as you can grow organically.
Speaker 2:Save that marketing until you're better known. If we knew that now, we would have taken that time.
Speaker 3:Also, like when we started Kid Simply, I had a health issue which set us back quite a lot and it was a worrying health issue where we couldn't really, you know, push through, through, pull through and really tackle the market like we was. We were worried for quite some time. So I think, knowing that maybe we should have given ourselves more time, given ourselves more time to prepare everything so that you know we start when everything is sorted, that's all yeah. Like if you know that you have something you're working on, you know, just get that out of the way so you don't start something. Then you're worried with the other worries that you have anyway in your life and really start when you're ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and secondly, join a lot of accelerator programs. I mean, you found us through the Migrant Accelerator. The advice they gave us made us make a lot of right decisions now, because may earlier said we did so many applications because people were telling us you're kind of a social project, you can get a lot of funding out there and so on, and the rejections give you a lot of a massive load that you lose track of what your actual goal is and that advice we're able to realize. Actually you know what we need to slow down. We need to ask ourselves questions again what do we want this for? What we're doing it for?
Speaker 3:yeah, but everyone's different. Every business is different. Some businesses demand that you have to grow faster. Right, for us it's not. We don't live off it and we can. We have the luxury of working on it slowly and let it grow slowly, the way we want it to grow.
Speaker 1:Cool, those are great, great parting words. So can you tell everyone at home where they can find KidSimply?
Speaker 3:wwwkidsimplyde. We are based in Berlin and I think the Berliners now know us quite a lot of them. We go to several markets, try niche markets, definitely, you know. So there are events like the African Food Festival, african Book Festival. You know certain local festivals as well where we can reach communities in different areas of Berlin. But yeah, we haven't really gone outside of Berlin and I think that's also another goal that we have, that we go and visit other cities in Germany that would love us to go, because we do get invitations to go to Stuttgart, to go to Cologne and Hamburg, but that would mean bringing all these products that we'd love to showcase, because we put a lot of effort into showcasing the products. Every market stand that we have kind of looks different, so it takes a while for us to set it all up, put it away, making sure the products don't get damaged as well.
Speaker 2:And also follow us on Kid Simply Shop, yeah, okay. On Instagram yes, On Instagram Kid Simply Shop.
Speaker 1:I'll put this all in the show. Don't worry, All right. Well, Peter May, it was really great to talk to you. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. You can find this episode and all other episodes of the Germany Expat Business Show at my website at wwwEleanorMeierhofercom slash podcast. That's wwwE-L-E-A-N-O-R-M-A-Y-R-H-O-F-orhofercom slash podcast. See you next time.