Justine Maynard, Founder and CEO of Kids Active Media, has not simply designed a children's educational brand; she has lived the experiences that make it necessary. As a mother who raised two daughters, she understands instinctively what children need, what captures their imagination, and what genuinely supports their development. The characters of POPIN Adventures were not created by a committee or a focus group. They were born from real love, real observation, and a deep, personal understanding of childhood, seen through children's eyes and shaped by a mother's instinct. Justine brings 24 years of professional experience in media and creative production to this venture, including a background in music production with multiple number-one country hits through her company Marmalay Music. She understands storytelling, audiences, and the mechanics of building something that connects emotionally, skills that translate directly into building a children's brand with genuine staying power, spanning award-winning books and theatre productions. But what sets Justine apart is not simply her professional experience. It is her character. She has built Kids Active Media while simultaneously holding down two other jobs to support her family and keep the business moving forward. There have been no shortcuts, no safety nets, and no 8-hour days. Every character, every story world, every educational framework, every retail relationship has been built through sheer dedication, creative passion, and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. She has never confused commitment with convenience. The resilience Justine brings to this business has been forged through real adversity. She does not need to be told that building something meaningful is difficult. She already knows, and she has demonstrated, over five years of self-funded development alongside every other demand on her life, that difficulty does not stop her; it focuses her. This is a founder who is not chasing a trend or responding to a market report. She is solving a problem she cares about, with tools she has spent a lifetime developing, in a sector she understands from the inside out. She has already invested everything she has into proving this can work. The next chapter is not about convincing Justine that this is worth doing. It is about giving her the resources to do what she is already entirely ready to do. She is not here to build a business. She is here to build an empire and she has already started.

The UK early years market has talented players in individual lanes - the BBC produces Numberblocks and Hey Duggee, Usborne and DK publish excellent books, Early Learning Centre sells well-made toys, but no single brand owns the complete journey from content to commerce to community. That is precisely where Kids Active Media sits, and it is a position no competitor currently occupies. We are the only UK children's brand that combines all of the following in one integrated ecosystem: Original character IP developed specifically to cover all seven EYFS learning areas and not just a single subject like numeracy or phonics, but the full developmental spectrum, including social-emotional learning, communication, physical development, and creative arts. Six characters, each with a distinct educational purpose, all designed with unisex appeal to reach every child equally. A content-to-commerce flywheel where animated series, books, and digital content don't just entertain, they build deep emotional attachment to characters that then drives families into our exclusive retail environments. Our content is our marketing, and its value compounds with every episode we produce. Exclusive pop-up retail experiences that transform shopping into an adventure. Unlike traditional toy retailers who sell products, we sell participation where children enter the world of the characters, not just a shop. Products are available only through our channels, eliminating price comparison and creating urgency that standard retail cannot replicate. Vertically integrated manufacturing and distribution, giving us 60–70% margins compared to the 30–40% typical of third-party retail. This structural efficiency is not just good for the business; it is what allows us to keep our products genuinely affordable for all families, not just those with disposable income to spare. Affordability as a core value, not an afterthought. Many of the most respected children's educational brands are, in practice, accessible only to families in higher income brackets. Premium price points, subscription models, and specialist retail placement quietly exclude the communities that often need support the most. POPIN Adventures is built on the opposite principle. From day one, our pricing strategy has been designed to ensure that families across all socioeconomic backgrounds can access and enjoy our brand, whether they encounter us through a major supermarket, a nursery, a pop-up shop in their local shopping centre, or free content on YouTube. Our magazine sits on supermarket shelves alongside everyday family shopping. Our animation is free to watch. Our pop-up shops are in shared community spaces, not premium boutiques. Our workbooks use household items, not expensive equipment. This is a deliberate, considered choice, because we believe that a magical educational experience should never be determined by a family's postcode or their bank balance. Every child, regardless of background, deserves to go on the POPIN adventure. Why is this the best long-term solution? It solves the problem at every level simultaneously. Competitors address one dimension, entertainment, or education, or retail and leave gaps. A child who watches Numberblocks but has no physical learning materials, no community experience, and no parental guidance toolkit is only partially served. POPIN Adventures surrounds the child and their family with consistent, reinforcing touchpoints that together create the school readiness outcomes the nation urgently needs. The business also becomes more valuable over time. Each episode produced adds to a permanent, licensable content library. Each character deepens brand equity. Each pop-up location generates a customer database that feeds the online store. Each nursery partnership extends reach without corresponding cost. The flywheel accelerates with scale, creating a compounding moat that becomes increasingly difficult for a new entrant to replicate. Finally, POPIN is built for the UK and rooted in the EYFS statutory framework, validated by health visitors and retail networks already trusted by British families, and designed around the specific developmental gaps identified in UK schools. This is not an adapted American format or a generic global brand. It is a genuinely British solution to a genuinely British problem, one that is affordable, accessible, and built for every community. A brand with first-mover advantage in a market that is ready for exactly what we are building.

A: Kids Active Media Limited specializes in creating educational and entertaining content for children aged 2-16 through unique character IPs that promote creative play and developmental learning. In addition to producing engaging programmes, we are launching a retail arm in 2026 featuring character-based toys, books, plushies, and magazines available online and via UK-wide POP-UP experience shops that deliver a theatrical and interactive shopping environment. For parents, our brands provide safe, trusted learning opportunities aligned with child development needs. Given that the UK toy and children’s book market exceeds £3.6 billion, we invite potential investors interested in capitalising on this growing sector to contact us directly for tailored investment opportunities within our expanding portfolio. Contact Rob Rowe robwrowe19@gmail.com(mailto:robwrowe19@gmail.com)

A: Kids Active Media Limited, founded by Justine Maynard, stands out as both an online toy store and a creator of educational children’s programming, specialising in content for ages 2 to teenagers. The company focuses on developing original Children’s Character IP that combines storytelling and education, aiming to entertain, inform, and inspire young audiences. By working with a team of talented individuals, Kids Active Media has built a creative hub and a trusted community of characters that enhance imaginative play while supporting a child’s developmental needs. Parents can rely on a safe platform that encourages healthy learning opportunities through carefully designed content and products. In 2026, Kids Active Media is expanding with a brand-new retail arm featuring character-based toys, books, plushies, and magazines available through POP-UP experience shops across the UK. These shops will provide an engaging, theatrical shopping experience that immerses families in the world of their favourite educational brands, reflecting the company’s commitment to combining play and learning in meaningful ways. The school readiness crisis through POPIN Adventures, a fully integrated children's educational brand that works on two levels simultaneously: equipping parents with the tools and confidence to support their child's development at home, and delivering that learning to children themselves through characters they genuinely love. At the heart of the brand are POPIN & GSR Magazine, a positively family fun magazine and a termly EYFS- aligned workbook delivered directly to families in mind with children who are starting to develop their cognitive skills from 2-years old. Unlike interventions that arrive after a child has already fallen behind, POPIN & GSR reach families during the critical 2–5 year window, before gaps emerge. Activities use only household items, the language is accessible to all literacy levels, and each workbook belongs personally to the child, creating ownership and intrinsic motivation to engage. Around the magazines sits a complete ecosystem of touchpoints that reinforce the same developmental goals across every part of a child's world: Animated series featuring original characters - SkipinRoo, Mr Jangles, YOYO Alphabet Dino, Boko the Book Bear, Maths With Sam, and Princess Kitty & Luna - each mapped to specific EYFS learning areas, from literacy and numeracy to emotional development and communication POPIN Adventures pop-up shops in high-footfall UK retail locations, creating immersive, hands-on brand experiences that extend learning beyond the screen Storybooks and audio stories that build pre-literacy skills and a love of reading. Educational toys and merchandise designed to encourage physical play, fine motor development, and imaginative learning, live theatre productions bringing the characters to life in interactive, high-energy performances. Crucially, none of this feels like education to a child. The adventures are funny, exciting, and emotionally engaging. Learning happens because children are too busy being enthralled by the characters to notice, and because POPIN is available at retail (Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Martins) as well as through nursery networks, it reaches families across all socioeconomic backgrounds and not just those who are already engaged. The result is a brand that works upstream of the problem, at scale, through channels families already trust.

We know we are helping people because the evidence of impact shows up at every level of the business, from the shelves of major UK supermarkets to the feedback of early years professionals to the commercial data that underpins our growth. Market demand as proof of need. POPIN Magazine has maintained a strong circulation through Waitrose, Sainsbury's, and Martins. Families are not obliged to pick it up, they choose to, repeatedly, because they find value in it. In a retail environment where shelf space is fiercely competitive and buyers make hard commercial decisions, sustained presence in premium family retailers is itself a form of validated impact. Recognition from the early years community. Mr Jangles and the POPIN character portfolio have received multiple Early Years book awards, independent recognition from practitioners and educators who evaluate content specifically on its developmental value and relevance to children's lives. This is not a commercial accolade; it comes from the professional community closest to the children we serve. Educational practitioner endorsement. POPIN's content has been developed in consultation with early years professionals and validated against the EYFS statutory framework. Practitioners in nurseries and pre-school settings have endorsed and used the content, educators who have no commercial incentive to recommend something that doesn't work. The data behind the problem we're solving. Our impact tracking begins with measuring the problem itself. We know that 30% of children arrive at Reception below expected levels. We know that 1 in 4 are not toilet-trained. We know that teachers identify parenting gaps and screen time as the primary causes. These are the benchmarks against which our programme's success will be measured and the Birmingham City Council pilot proposal, designed with a rigorous evaluation framework tracking the Reception Baseline Assessment scores and EYFS Profile outcomes will give us longitudinal data comparing our cohort against control groups over three years. Parent engagement as a live signal. The workbook model is delivered with the child in mind, they engage more, because they owns their learning materials, parents report visible enthusiasm: children bringing their workbooks to parents, asking to do the activities, talking about the characters. This qualitative feedback from families using the programme tells us that the emotional hook is working, which is the precondition for any learning to take place. Commercial performance as a proxy for value. Parents make careful spending decisions. A product that doesn't genuinely help their child does not get repurchased, does not generate word of mouth, and does not sustain retail distribution. Every copy sold, every subscription renewed, and every new retail listing earned is a family voting with their wallet that POPIN is worth their time and money. What we are building toward. As POPIN Adventures scales, through animation, pop-up retail, and nursery partnerships, we will formalise our impact measurement through school readiness assessments, teacher surveys, local authority reporting, and longitudinal tracking of pilot cohorts. We are committed to building an evidence base that meets the standard of any serious educational intervention, because we believe that is what the children we serve deserve. We are members and supporters of the National Literacy Trust: A reading crisis that demands urgent action. The scale of the problem we are addressing has never been more stark. In 2025, fewer than 1 in 5 children aged 8 to 18 read something daily in their free time, the lowest level ever recorded, with daily reading having dropped by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005. Just 1 in 3 children said they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2025, the lowest figure in two decades, with the steepest recent decline now hitting primary-aged children. Even among children aged 5 to 8, daily reading rates dropped by 3.4 percentage points in the past year to 44.5%, and have fallen by 9.1 percentage points since 2019. We want to make an impact on these figures. Especially in the world of AI, it is so easy for children to cut corners, and although we as a company use AI tools, we know that a child must learn to use the best computer behind AI - their little brains! One in four children leaves primary school without the literacy foundations they need. Not reading at the expected level puts children at increased risk of unemployment and poor health as adults. This is precisely why POPIN Adventures intervenes at ages 2–7, before these patterns take hold. By building a child's emotional relationship with characters, stories, and books in their earliest years - through POPIN Magazine, Boko the Book Bear, animated series, and storybooks - we are establishing the reading habit at the only point when it is truly malleable. Children who fall in love with books before school are far better equipped to sustain that relationship through primary years and beyond. We are not treating the symptom; we are building the foundation.

Too many children in the UK are arriving at school unprepared, unable to count to 20, hold a pencil, button their coat, or communicate their basic needs. Research shows that approximately 30% of children start Reception below expected developmental levels, and 1 in 4 are not yet toilet-trained. The root cause is a gap in parents' awareness, confidence, and practical tools to act as their child's first teacher during the critical 2–5 year developmental window. The consequences are significant and costly. Schools are forced to divert resources toward catch-up support rather than teaching, teachers spend vital early weeks managing developmental deficits, and children themselves can experience anxiety and loss of confidence at a moment that should feel exciting and positive. The UK government spends over £5 billion annually on reactive educational interventions, many of which research shows actively harm the children they aim to help. Kids Active Media addresses this issue at the source, equipping parents before gaps emerge through POPIN & GSR (Get School Ready) an EYFS-aligned, affordable educational brand delivered directly into family homes via retail and health visitor networks. By making early years learning accessible, engaging, and affordable for all families, we aim to give every child the foundation they need to start school ready, confident, and excited to learn.