What we did: User research, mobile app design & development, web design & development, go-to-market strategy
“Rise's team worked with us from the very conception of the project. This highly collaborative approach meant a wide range of people from inside and outside the business were able to feed in. The result has been a huge success – not only for adults, children, Julia Donaldson and the Gruffalo team, but across the wider Macmillan global group.”
– James Luscombe, Marketing Technology Director, Macmillan Publishers
The Gruffalo is one of those rare properties that belongs to everyone who grew up with it. Julia Donaldson's words, Axel Scheffler's illustrations, a cast of characters that children fall in love with before they can tie their own shoes. So when Pan Macmillan came to us ahead of the book's 15th anniversary, the ask was simple enough on the surface: build an online presence that actually matches the magic of everything else in The Gruffalo universe – the toys, the TV specials, the pop-up events.
Because the existing website? It wasn't keeping up. Every other touchpoint had evolved, and the website was still sitting there like a digital afterthought. Pan Macmillan knew it, and they wanted it fixed.
Here's where it gets interesting, and where a lot of product builds go sideways. A brand like The Gruffalo has a lot of stakeholders. The author. The illustrator. The publisher. Marketing teams across multiple territories. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone's opinion matters – to a point.
But the people who matter most? They're three feet tall and can't spell “stakeholder.”
We didn't start with a brief from the boardroom. We started by sitting down with children aged 3 to 8 and watching how they actually interact with screens, stories, and games.
And what we learned surprised even us. Given the right stimulus, these kids could lose themselves completely in a digital world. They were far more capable on devices than their parents gave them credit for. And they didn't need hand-holding – the right experience could keep them happily absorbed for ten minutes or more, entirely on their own. That's not a small insight. That became the entire foundation of what we built.
We created a fully immersive, mobile-first world called The Deep Dark Wood. Not a website with some games bolted on. A world – one that filled the screen, rich with activities, stories, and things to discover. Beautifully illustrated by our friends at Aardman Animation, it featured singalongs with Julia Donaldson herself and gave children the freedom to explore, play, and wander at their own pace.
The guiding principle was generous: give them plenty to do, plenty to read, plenty to learn, plenty to enjoy. And then get out of the way.
But here's the thing – children weren't the only audience. Adults needed something too, and their agenda is (unsurprisingly) quite different. So without disrupting the immersive world their kids were happily lost in, we layered in downloadable teaching materials, merchandise, competition entries, and shareable content for parents and educators. Two audiences, one experience, no friction between them.
With so many people invested in The Gruffalo brand, the potential for decision-by-committee was real. And direct access to the author and illustrator wasn't always easy to get, which meant the decision line ran primarily through the publisher.
This is something we see regularly on product builds – the more people who care about an outcome, the harder it can be to move quickly. Our approach was straightforward: earn trust as an impartial project lead, evidence every decision with what the audience actually told us, and then act decisively. It's not glamorous, but it works. And it freed us up to build something that served the users, not the org chart.
One of the joys of this project was the space to be playful. We hid Easter eggs throughout the site – little surprises that would reveal themselves unexpectedly. An ant crawling across the screen mid-meeting. Hidden animations tucked into corners. We kept them secret from the client, which meant they got to discover them the way users would – with genuine delight.
When we first revealed the finished site to Julia Donaldson, she was thrilled. That moment alone was worth the entire build.
We built the site using HTML5 and JavaScript to work across every major platform and device, and made sure the content was easy to update with new events, activities, and seasonal campaigns. It was hosted on Microsoft Azure to handle the inevitable traffic spikes whenever a TV campaign or event landed.
And here's the part that founders should really pay attention to: the site we launched stayed fundamentally the same for years. Regular updates, yes. But no major rebuild, no expensive re-platform, no “we need to start again from scratch” conversation twelve months later. That's what happens when you do the research upfront, build for the right audience, and make smart technology choices from day one. Pan Macmillan didn't have to keep pouring money into it. The investment stuck.
The numbers told a pretty clear story:
For context, getting anyone to spend four minutes on a website is hard. Getting 3-to-8-year-olds to spend ten? That only happens when you've built something they genuinely don't want to leave.
The best products don't start with a feature list. They start with a conversation – usually with the people everyone else forgot to ask.
Whether you're building a children's digital experience or a B2B SaaS platform, the lesson here is the same. Talk to your actual users before you build anything. Not your investors, not your advisory board, not your mate who once worked at a tech company. Your users. The insight that shaped this entire project – that young children are far more autonomous on devices than anyone assumed – didn't come from a strategy deck. It came from watching kids play.
If you've got an idea and you're not sure where to start, that's exactly what our discovery calls are for. Thirty minutes with a Rise founder, no obligation, and you'll walk away with something useful whether we end up working together or not.
30 minutes. One conversation. No obligation.
