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How We Started
My wife and I started ChildBook.com in 1997 because we got very frustrated with
the Chinese items we could buy in the US to teach our daughter
Mandarin.
We had agreed that we wanted to give our daughter the
wonderful gift of being bilingual in Mandarin and English (trilingual
if you count Taiwanese). We started bugging relatives coming from
Taiwan. We also visited every Chinese bookstore. We got terribly frustrated
with the variety, quality, and price of the Learning-Chinese products.
That time, I was also taking an MBA class
(Peter Drucker was teaching it)
that had a business improvement project. I decided to start my own business as a way to implement the project.
After my
presentation,
ChildBook.com was born in 1997. Our mission: To provide Chinese
language
and culture materials. Our goal was to be associated with high quality items, fair prices and great service.
The Journey
At first, ChildBook.com started selling books and we used the Internet as a
way to sell these.
People had to send in their checks and we shipped out
the books, tapes, and some CDs.
We then noticed that videos were also
available, and that these have the same format as in the US (including Disney with
excellent quality). This was exciting for us, it meant kids may also watch Mandarin videos even if they are in the US. So videos got added to ChildBook and the name lost
some of its meaning.
Along the way, we got a shopping cart, an SSL,
we changed E-Commerce systems to a database-driven one and got very good at
fixing bugs. We also got to meet a lot of wonderful customers, with whom we have had the privilege of making a very positive difference in their lives. (It also worked vice versa.)
The Future
Our plan is to keep on improving ChildBook and providing great items
and services to our customers. If you have any suggestions, problems,
complaints, or questions, please send an E-Mail. You can also greet us at Twitter.
The best part of
running ChildBook.com is the positive feedback from our customers.
Customer feedback is very educational and we honestly can't get enough
of it.
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