Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel Kelly.
Hi Rachel, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I’m actually in the middle of writing a memoir about the journey that has brought Colorworld Books to where we presently are, which is a pop culture merchandise company that began with a book series named Colorworld. For the last 8 years, we’ve been traveling America to different comic and anime conventions to spread all our awesome merch and promote the books. The memoir is going to be called Mile 252, but as I began to write it, trying to “start” somewhere, I found I kept getting drawn back to the past, long before Colorworld was conceived. It all started with a boy and a girl, Bradley, my husband, and me, Rachel. That was 20 years ago at Western Carolina University.
As cheesy as it sounds, love is what got us here. Bradley has always had an interest in my happiness, and my fulfillment. He seemed to sense that I had something in me worth sharing with the world, pushing me to try new things, ask better questions, and be uncomfortable with the status quo. So when he discovered that I had written a book series, he jumped at the chance to promote the thing I had poured my soul into.
He gave up everything to do that for the past 8 years, his well-paying job, his own interests, his dignity as a provider for our family, and lots and lots and lots of sleep. I have always been in the passenger seat, metaphorically speaking.
He’s the idea guy, the one who started selling the bookmarks, the metal prints. He’s the one who fostered all the relationships with other authors, artists, and anime industry professionals. He expanded our merchandise offerings to apparel, and he started Colorworld LIVE, our online convention platform during the pandemic when conventions and our livelihood disappeared in a day. I was beside him, helping him to do those things, but it was all his idea.
But I was never treated like free labor or simply a sideshow. I always felt like the main event. I knew, and still know, that all of these things that Colorworld now does has been to provide more avenues to promote my book series, which, by the way, inspired him. I love that he loves me so well and I wrote about it in a book. He loves that I love him, so he wants to tell the world about it. That’s what we’re about. A couple of kids. In love. Living a dream together.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
We presently have 7 full-time employees outside of Brad and myself, and they each have the understanding that we live constantly under the reality of Murphy’s Law. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong. The simplest things will be difficult, and the hardest things will seem impossible.
Fortunately, as I said earlier, Brad is always at the ready, and when someone says impossible, he is the guy who steps in. We’ve had hundreds of minor setbacks such as flat tires on the way to set up at a convention as well as going into a convention with so little money that we could only afford to purchase a hotel room for the first night; the rest would have to be paid for after the first day of making money. Considering our business involves so much driving all over the country, we’ve experienced literally hundreds of mechanical problems of varying degrees. We even drove through a literal hurricane once.
We’ve also faced larger problems, like scandals surrounding the artists we worked with that ended up sending shrapnel our way. We’ve trained a number of people to work for us only to have them learn our business model, quit, and then reappear with our exact same booth under a different name. We’ve had some of those same employees spread lies about our company to every convention circuit whose attention they could garner in an effort to wipe us out. We faced a pandemic that eradicated 100% of our income. We had to figure out how to reinvent ourselves out of nothing.
These are only a handful of our obstacles from the last 8 years. We’ve come to expect that every single effort is going to meet opposition, and a lot of it is going to be jaw-droppingly ridiculous. When one of us announces that such and such thing happened to cause a problem, the response is always a nod and “Of course. Yep.” Opposition is expected, so expected, in fact, that when the rare occasion happens that it doesn’t, we become immediately suspicious. If things are too easy, we are uneasy. That’s just how we’ve been conditioned.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Brad and I are most proud of the family we have grown through Colorworld. Most individuals who currently work for us come to us from other areas of the country. They’re people we have known for years, who have loved Colorworld for a long time, and they work for us because they believe in Brad and me, not because we pay them a decent salary or because they think anime is cool. We are all so heavily integrated into each other’s lives; we don’t have employee drama because they all care deeply about each other. It’s a beautiful and rare thing to see, and sometimes Brad and I just sit back and watch them be there for each other, emotionally and socially. We are a family, and they all endure Murphy’s law daily stupid opposition to Colorworld life because they love us, and they love each other.
Yes, we sell things: anime metal bookmarks and prints, apparel, and anime toys. But it’s just a means to allow us to have all these wonderful people together under one roof, growing and becoming our best selves.
We all have different ways of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
I used to think there would be an endpoint of sorts to what we have been doing. Maybe my book series would take off and we could stop doing all these other things that were just tangent to it. Maybe we would establish ourselves as the name in online conventions and we’d focus on just that so I could plug away at writing books and Brad could be home consistently. Maybe, maybe, maybe. That has never happened. We’ve never had just one thing because of so much heavy and ongoing opposition. As soon as we got good at one thing, that one thing became obsolete or was taken out from under us for one reason or another. Then we would have to pivot to the next thing. After 8 years of so many fights I’ve had to ask myself this very question: are we successful?
My best practical answer is that it depends on which aspect of Colorworld we’re talking about. My book series, for example, is not successful as a means to make money. I don’t sell enough books to pay my bills, and that’s always been my and Brad’s greatest desire. If we’re talking about having a respected name in the anime industry, yes. We are wildly successful at that. Despite the name-smearing and attempts to out-compete us, we are the leading name in metal prints and bookmarks in our niche of anime. We’re quickly becoming as notorious in anime apparel. We have connections and resources. We are known and respected as an online convention purveyor and a metal print manufacturer. We are successful at those things.
And we have people who work for and with us, who have been and currently are fighting for Colorworld’s future. This is a huge success. I don’t know another business that has the kind of people we have. So in this aspect, our success is unparalleled.
So I have to ask myself, what has led to all these successes? The answer is integrity. With so much opposition, it’s been tempting to do things in ways that might have been questionable from a moral standpoint. Instead, we’ve committed ourselves with ironclad determination to not vary from the belief that honesty and decency are the only way to live and do business. We are transparent about our practices to our employees and to the outside world, even if nobody wants to know. We’ve publicly owned up to our mistakes. Brad and I always pick the harder job so that our employees don’t have to. When we started this thing, I wanted to prove that a good person could live honestly and build something great, and we have done that, and we’re going to keep doing that.
Contact Info:
- Website: colorworldBOOKS.com colorworldLIVE.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/colorworldbooks
- Facebook: facebook.com/colorworldbooks facebook.com/colorworldlive
- Twitter: twitter.com/colorworldbooks
- Youtube: youtube.com/ColorworldBooks
Image Credits
Colorworld Books
