We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Azulita. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Azulita below.

Azulita, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

Students today are facing a world with many more distractions and pressures than in the past. Schools are having budgets slashed with expectations on educators being increased exponentially. While we, as a small business, have little sway over the politics and funding of education, we have made it a mission to support and inspire learners and educators. We create interactive materials and activities, appropriate for all learners, that help them embrace their authentic selves while setting goals for fulfilling lives.

We’ve begun releasing new Executive Functioning units to develop skills that help us all write our own definitions of success and then achieve it. Recently, we released an executive functioning unit on organization. We find that if the content is compelling and useful to us as adults, it will also be applicable to learners. Many of us can improve our organizational systems and with curriculum that is both supportive and allows you to select what is most appropriate for you, it also develops learner confidence while practicing and mastering these skills.

Our next Executive Functioning unit will be focused on Time Management, a skill that all of us can continue to practice and improve. Aligning our investment of time with our priorities, frees us to make our dreams a reality. We are thrilled to be able to offer this (and so much more) to all the learners and educators out there!

From our time in the classroom, we noticed that elementary schools are especially overloaded with what they must cover. This leads to students getting to higher and higher grades without the essential life skills being explicitly taught like executive functioning and social emotional learning. Many educators have so many responsibilities overflowing from their plates and do not have the capacity to curate inspiring content and juggle all of the tasks on their to do lists. We saw so many bright and promising learners struggling unnecessarily just because they were missing a few skills. Since we left the classroom, these deficits have only grown. This continues to motivate us to create inspiring content which helps educators and students thrive.

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

We are a collaborative of educators and designers. Together we have over 19 years of experience in education and 25 years of experience in design. We make compelling, heart-led curriculum in areas that are underserved in education. Over 90% of our website offerings are free materials and self-care resources. We offer full, curated unit plans at intentional prices, so that no educator is turned away. We know many educators pay out of pocket for their curriculum and classroom essentials. We want to support them while also following our dreams of designing curriculum that inspires, nurtures, and honors authentic identities.

Our years in the classroom also highlighted the dire need for engaging and age-appropriate materials for middle and high school students who have struggled in the traditional learning system. Just because a student may currently read at the 2nd grade level, doesn’t mean they want or should be given 2nd grade materials. Many students would toss those items back and declare, “I don’t want this baby shit.” Curriculum should be validating and relevant. By incorporating choices, we foster self-actualization and confidence building.

Throughout these past few pandemic years, the great need for social emotional learning came to the forefront of educational issues. We offer a comprehensive year’s worth of curated and designed Social Emotional (SEL) curriculum and materials. The data on all the benefits of SEL is incredibly compelling. All of us benefit from these activities, and we are thrilled to see many educators incorporating them into their classrooms. We even have a second year’s worth of SEL curriculum in the works…stay tuned!

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We are primarily an Ecommerce endeavor, as we sell directly to customers. At the beginning of our journey we put up our website (azulita.org) and tried to bring people to our site for materials both free and paid.

Although we still prefer to host our guests on our own site, we started to realize that most educators turn to Teachers Pay Teachers for their materials when they are in need.

We are most interested in meeting people where they are and providing them with what they need to provide inspiring and age appropriate materials for their students. Even though we hadn’t planned on utilizing the platform prior to starting our business, we want teachers to find our materials easily, and Teachers Pay Teachers is often the easiest route for them.

The pros of using this service is that teachers already know it and utilize it. The cons is that Teachers Pay Teachers takes a cut of the earnings from usage of their platform, which is fine and standard, but they take a larger cut than other online sales platforms, like Etsy for instance. We don’t think this is fair to their creator base of largely working teachers, hoping to earn extra income from sharing their materials, but know that there’s little that can be done to change what platform people utilize.

We now do both, hosting our products on our own website as well as a Teachers Pay Teachers store. In the end it is good that people have different ways to encounter our work and hopefully find it valuable in their own education practice.

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

We’ve had to pivot a few times in our business. We began with the idealistic idea that we would give away all of our materials essentially for free and ask for donations. We had seen this business model gaining traction in the social media space, particularly with YouTube and Patreon, and we wondered if that could possibly work for our business. Afterall, teachers are the generous sort… so we gave it a shot.

It turned out that this model was either too confusing to our customers or we just didn’t know how to market it well. Or, probably a combination of the two.

After trying Patreon out for a few months, we decided to pivot to a more traditional pay to download model on our website. We saw immediate growth, and overall it has worked out much better for us.

More recently, we have grown more aware of who our customers are and the platforms they use. We had a small presence on the website Teachers Pay Teachers since shortly after our inception, but after running a few ads targeted to people who visited our website and people who were interested in Teachers Pay Teachers, we found the engagement to be higher with the Teachers Pay Teachers audience. After that discovery, we put more of our materials on TPT and have been adding features specific to that platform. This too has helped us grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://azulita.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/growazulita/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/growazulita
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/growazulita/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTTpYISLaWXpftKE13fyE_w
• Other: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/growazulita

Image Credits
Adam A. Hunt