Our new home
We’ve moved! To the beautiful city of Seattle, Washington.
Actually, we began this move a little over a year ago, but it’s taken us a while to get settled in. If you’re not familiar with our story, around 2005, we (Devon, Troy, and Tanja) started making simple songs for teaching basic language skills to young English learners at a school we ran in Tokyo, Japan. In 2009, we started Super Simple Learning to focus more on creating educational materials for young learners. Along the way, we had help from a lot of great people and added Mike and Eri to our team.
A couple of years ago, we started to feel home calling. We’d all lived an ocean away from our families for a long time. So we made the difficult decision to begin moving our company and ourselves to North America, and we decided Seattle would be the perfect spot for us to settle. Our partner, Hiroya, and our friends at www.englishbooks.jp continue to take good care of us in Japan and we plan to visit often.
It’s been a bit of a process to get everyone here, but in April of 2013, the last of our team made the move over from Japan, and we opened our office in the wonderful neighborhood of Ballard in Seattle. And this month, we got the great news that Troy received the necessary visa allowing him to make the short trip down from Vancouver, Canada to work with us in our Seattle office from October. Tanja is teaching and conducting teacher training in San Diego, CA, and remains involved with Super Simple Learning as an Educational Consultant and frequent blog contributor.
So…what does this all mean?
Well, we are ready to go! The changes and moves over the last 18 months slowed us down a bit, but now we’re moving full steam ahead. A couple of months ago, our website was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2013 by Time Magazine. We’re working hard to make it even better, with more free downloadable content you can use with or without Super Simple Learning products. Check back often!
This week, we passed one billion views on our Super Simple Songs YouTube Channel and we released a special new video to thank everyone for supporting us. The video takes place in the same magical forest that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Little Snowflake are set in and features a couple of special appearances. We have several more fun videos in production and we’ll be releasing new videos regularly throughout the rest of the year. Stay tuned ^_^.
We have also released our first DVD! It’s FINALLY here, and it includes 15 of our most popular videos including high quality versions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Row Row Row Your Boat, & BINGO, an extended version of The Alphabet Song, an all-new version of Uh-huh featuring Jeremy, and 10 more super simple, super fun videos. We’re very, very excited to share this with you!
We also have two new picture books. Many people have asked us for picture books based on the videos, and we’re starting with two of the most requested…Five Little Monkeys and BINGO. These books work great on their own, or as companions to the DVD. We’ve got more planned, so let us know what you think!
We’re also working on new music, and maybe, just maybe, some plushies. ^_^
So stay tuned. The best is yet to come!
And if you should find yourself in Seattle, let us know. We’d love to have a cup of coffee with you!
