Lost My Name lays off staff

Publishing startup Lost My Name has laid off nine members of staff as part of plans to improve perfomance and invest more money in the product.

Co-founder Asi Sharabi told The Bookseller: "Sadly we had to let some of our people go. It has been an efficiency and growth-focused decision that reflects our new priorities and growth initiatives. We just launched our books in China. We are still seeing a significant year-on-year growth, we are well capitalised and still ahead of Q4 where we generate a significant part of our revenues. We decided to make these tough calls now in the interest of improving performance and investing more funds in our story and product studios."

The London-based company, founded by Sharabi, Tal Oron, David Cadji-Newby and Pedro Srapicus in 2012, creates children’s books that are customised with the reader’s name. It has received $13m (£9m) in Series A investment so far, including €4m (£3.2m) in funding from Berlin-based investor Project A Ventures last month.

Lost My Name currently has two books on the market. The first, ‘The Little Boy/Girl Who Lost His/Her Name’ (below) outsold Julia Donaldson’s Superworm, according to Sharabi, with sales totalling 132,616 in the UK in 2014, while sales of Superworm, the highest-ranking picture book (according to Nielsen BookScan) totted up at 115,996 in the same year.

The company's second book, The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home, has been available in the UK and the US since Autumn 2015 and is launching in Europe later in 2016.