We were lucky to catch up with Shanti Grossman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Shanti, thanks for joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you as a business owner?

One point that I am so passionate about sharing about my journey is….my journey! From the outside looking in, it appears as if A Brighter Year was an overnight viral success, but that is not the whole story. When you look at just the story of A Brighter Year, yes it was a quick success, but what people don’t always look at is the entrepreneurship journey I have been on for 20 years. Along the way there have been a lot of businesses that have started and failed. There have been service based businesses and product based businesses. Businesses that lost money for years before I eventually closed them down, and a business that I built and eventually sold, and every step of the way I was learning how to set up my next business for more success than the last.

I think the most important lesson I have learned from prior jobs is to never stop learning, and applying the new knowledge to your next step in the process, because eventually you’ll have enough of the right pieces of knowledge to finally flourish!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi! I’m Shanti Grossman, the Founder and CEO of A Brighter Year, a company that specializes in simple and easy coloring books for adults, that catapulted to success in 2023 after going viral on TikTok.

After going viral, A Brighter Year passed the milestone of $1M in revenue in just 9 months, which is a milestone that less than 2% of female founded companies in America will ever hit. Which is still hard for me to wrap my head around somedays because 1) I grew up in a trailer park 2) I sell coloring books for $8. You can probably do some quick math and figure out, that is a LOT of coloring books. And here is the deal, coloring has been around for hundreds of years, so how did A Brighter Year disrupt such an old industry….well let me tell you my story!

Growing up, I LOVED coloring. Even through college and into early adulthood coloring was always something that I would come back to, but then I had kids. Being a working mom with 2 under 2 left little time for the hobbies I used to enjoy, but I was also at a stage in life where I needed those hobbies more than ever for my own mental health. The problem with all the hobbies I used to enjoy is they took a long time, a lot of money, or a lot of supplies, and at that stage in life, I didn’t have much of any of those things readily available to me!

I would often start a page in a traditional adult coloring book and I would immediately feel defeated. The pages would take hours to finish, which I never had time for. That left me just coloring a small section of the page, which left me feeling defeated, and also those coloring books require SO MANY DECISIONS! If there is one thing I’ve learned being a working mom is that by the time I am sitting down to do something for me, I do not want to make anymore decisions!

I looked and looked for a coloring book that was simple and easy, something that would fit into my busy schedule, and couldn’t find them anywhere. Of course I could buy the same coloring books my kids were coloring in, but I didn’t want to sit down for my relaxation time, and be stuck coloring the characters from the latest kids TV show or movie. I wanted illustrations that I actually enjoyed and that I found enjoyable at this stage in my life.

After not finding them, I set out on a mission to start a company that created simple and easy coloring books for adults. Pages that only required a few color choices, so there would be no decision fatigue, and had pages that took just 3-5 minutes to finish, leaving you feeling accomplished instead of defeated. It turns out there were a lot of people on social media that wanted exactly that too, which is what lead to our quick success.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Although we’re still working on finding our audience on Instagram and YouTube, TikTok is our happy place. Here’s the thing about TikTok, you just have to be consistent and stay in your niche, and you will get to your people! We have heard time and time again that TikTok has one of the smartest algorithms, and if you post consistently you will see traction.

The formula I had heard was a path to success was posting 2-3 times a day for 90 days, that all stayed strictly in your niche. It was almost 90 days exactly that I went viral for the first time on TikTok, and that day changed the trajectory of our entire business.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When you start a small business you are often a doer. You spend a lot of time working in the business and sometime working on the business as well. As the business has continued to grow, I have had to switch my time to solely working on the business, and now rarely get to work in the business.

As much as I really do miss those days of packing and shipping orders, and editing social media content, I know that those are tasks that the team I have created is 110% capable of doing (and sometimes better at doing them than me!). I have to remind myself that as this business has grown faster and bigger than even my wildest dreams could have ever imagined, which that comes a lot of new adventures. And right now my new adventure is stepping into a role of CEO and visionary for the company, and that is exactly where I need to be right now!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://abrighteryear.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abrighteryear/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abrighteryear
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/abrighteryear
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ABrighterYear
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@abrighteryear

Image Credits

Laura Morsman Photography