Meet Benjamin. Benjamin loves to read, and he loves to draw. He also wants to inspire other kids to love reading, and he realized that his drawings could help. Benjamin started to create monsters, each with a story behind it. He told us that he wanted his monsters — and their stories — to help other kids to get better at reading.
His idea was to sell t-shirts with these monsters on them and donate money from the sales of the shirts to a childhood literacy organization. We created a company called Good Monsters to do this.
As of today, we’re launching our first monster: the Lava Monster, Benjamin’s first creation. We have three t-shirts with the Lava Monster (click to buy them on Amazon!) in different designs. You can get the outline version you see Benjamin modeling above either as a white or black outline on shirts in fun colors, and the second is a full color version. Half of the money we get after selling these shirts will go to support childhood literacy programs. The first program we are going to support is Smart Start.
But this is just the beginning. Benjamin has a universe of Good Monsters waiting for us to bring them to life — not just on shirts, but even more importantly, as stories. As Good Monsters grows and we’re able to fund more ideas to support literacy, we’ll use the monsters themselves to tell stories that inspire other children (of any age) to read and to create their own stories. We think that Benjamin’s monsters can be the foundation of a much larger program that uses his creations to inspire children to tell stories, and through storytelling, inspire them to rewrite their own stories. We plan to eventually have Good Monsters programs that use a variety of different ways to engage kids who are just learning to read, such as participating in storytelling sessions, making short animated films, and more.
For now, we’re just getting started, and we’d be thrilled if you came along on the journey with us. You can buy a Good Monsters shirt from the links below, and follow us here or on Twitter or Instagram so you can find out about Benjamin’s next creations and their impact on the world.
Both shirts are available in multiple colors, on high quality all-cotton t-shirts. We donate 50% of the money we get from each sale (currently about $5 per shirt) to Smart Start.
