From Passion to Purpose: Inspiring a New Generation of Animal Advocates

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Jenny Curtis with edZOOcation. Welcome.

Jenny Curtis: Thank you so much. I’m very excited to be here. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about edZOOcation. How are you serving folks?

Jenny Curtis: Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So, edZOOcation kind of came about just through different avenues. But my background is all exotic animals and animal welfare and animal education, in that space, and so we wanted to do like a physical product for kids where they could shift gears and learn at home. You know, kind of throwbacks to when I was younger, we had zoo books and things like that, but a little bit more, a little bit more than just a book. We wanted a whole experience, a whole 360 degree experience for the kids.

Jenny Curtis: So, we have our edZOOcation subscription boxes and they teach kids all about animals, zoology. We go into different biology, touch points, anatomy, all sorts of fun stuff. We always include some kind of STEM in there. And we have it geared for three different age groups, so we have 3 to 5, 6 to 8, and 9 to 12, so we’re really touching on their developmental point in their life and, obviously, their love for animals, that’s why they find us and that’s who we serve.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you talk about your personal journey? I would imagine most kids love animals when they’re little. You know, what kind of compelled you to stay connected with animals throughout your whole career?

Jenny Curtis: Yeah. Well, it’s not a choice, I’ll say that.

Lee Kantor: It’s not a choice.

Jenny Curtis: I had no control over it. I’ve just been obsessed since I was little. I mean, I was the one out there with caterpillars and baby birds, and anything I could find. And it just continued into my adulthood. I just didn’t lose interest in it. As kids go through tons of interests while they’re young, that was the one that, for me, just stuck. And it was evident all through even middle school, high school. I wanted to be a zookeeper. College, I went for zoology and ended up going to a vocational, you know, animal training and education college. And so, I mean, it really has been my entire life. I just never grew out of it.

Lee Kantor: But as you were going through it, you were obsessed and you were kind of nerding out on this whole kind of zoology path, were your friends, solely dropping off? They were like, “Jenny, okay, we get it. You like caterpillars.”

Jenny Curtis: Yes and no. I mean, I had a couple close friends that were definitely like, you know, we shared toads and stuff. But for the most part, yeah, I definitely got a little more sparse as I got through high school and whatnot, because definitely people do not have that same very niche interest as I did. But, you know, it’s still a positive thing. People were never mean about it or anything like that for me.

Jenny Curtis: But it definitely was really nice going to college and just seeing another group of people who were as dedicated as I was to this interest and to preserving these animals, because that was not my day-to-day experience. So, finding a group of people and learning that people really do care about this in larger groups outside of myself was huge for me.

Jenny Curtis: And that’s what I want kids to know. I want them to know that they’re not alone in this interest. They can take their love of animals and go into any field. They don’t have to go into zoology or conservation or be a zookeeper or a veterinarian. They could be conserving animals doing IT work. They can be conserving animals doing medical field work, doing public relations. I mean, the possibilities are endless with making an impact in conservation.

Lee Kantor: So, when you have the idea of we’re going to make this learning kind of three dimensional. We want to build a box where there are stuff in it that they can touch and play with and educate them. How did that kind of come about? Were you kind of modeling it after other things you’ve seen? Or was this kind of something that you were thinking about kind of from a blank slate?

Jenny Curtis: Well, so part of my college vocational training was doing wildlife education, live presentations with animals, you know, teaching kids about animals in person, holding a snake or cockroaches or whatnot. And so, after college, I actually started my own rescue and outreach, and we successfully placed and took in over 250 animals during just four years doing this. This was in Florida and, obviously, they have a much larger exotic animal problem and there are a ton of pets, so it’s, you know, improper housing and all that.

Jenny Curtis: So, we were able to take them in, either place them with appropriate zoo or facility homes or use them in our educational programs where we did the same thing. We went to schools and birthday parties and Girl Scouts and community events, and just taught kids and the public about animals in general. So, for me, turning this from a live presentation with animals into a physical presentation with toys and reading materials and curriculum that they can learn at home, it was kind of just the next step.

Jenny Curtis: And obviously for my family, it worked out a lot better than having a ton of animals around all the time. At the time we had two small kids, so it was a lot to manage, and that’s kind of one of the reasons we switched gears, my husband and I, and kind of closed the live animal portion of it down. There’s people who are doing it fantastically, and you can go to zoos and aquariums and see these animals and get that live presentation. But what we didn’t see was the at-home learning and that’s where we wanted to connect the dots.

Lee Kantor: So, walk me through, like I get the box, what is inside of the box? You mentioned stuffed animals and there’s learning. Is there ways for me to kind of explore my environment where I can look for certain things that might be around my geography?

Jenny Curtis: Yes and no. So, ours is kind of like animal of the month style. So, each month is a brand new endangered animal. Our core items are the stuffed animal, full size stuffed animal, super snuggly, a great reading buddy for kids who are struggling to learn to read. It really helps make that emotional connection for them. We do have an age appropriate book based on, again, the ages and their reading levels. We have an activity magazine, kind of going back to highlights from a couple decades back where it’s like fun games and activities. It could be scavenger hunts. It could be crafts. There’s always a recipe either from the region that the animal natively lives or something kind of fun and featuring the animal.

Jenny Curtis: We have an ecosystem poster where it’s interactive. The kids get to fill in the ecosystem with the stickers to see kind of how everything works together. The web of life that the animal lives in. We do dive into anatomy. We have a paper dissection kit where they get to do kind of crafty cuts and make a layered paper dissection kit so they can kind of see what the internal anatomy looks like. And, again, over the many months, they’re getting these comparisons and they’re getting to see the differences between some of these very different animals. And then, we also have some kind of game or craft activity for each box as well.

Jenny Curtis: So, it’s really fully hands on. People do the video side of it. We didn’t need to redo that. There’s so many great videos out there, so many great educational channels and content producers that, for us, we needed the physical, in-person products. That was kind of, again, the missing piece for they can see the animals live at a zoo. They can watch the animals on Netflix. And then, now, they can read about them, they can cuddle them, and they can learn more about every other aspect of their life.

Lee Kantor: So then, there isn’t a component where there is community building where you’re trying to, you know, tune in to this live stream of Jenny doing something with an animal where all the members —

Jenny Curtis: Right. We don’t have a live animal component anymore. We’d love to bring that back. Just right now with where we’re at, we call ourselves the startup within a startup. We only started the subscription model a couple years back. And before that, we were mainly stuffed animals and just general animal products. So, we’re still gearing all of that up. We do have digital books and things like that. And we’d love to introduce a live animal component again, probably like a zookeeper Q&A type of thing or just a live animal program in that sense, but we don’t have that quite yet.

Lee Kantor: So, you’re physically building these boxes, like, is that part of the challenge of a business like this that you have to take all the components? Or is that something you’ve outsourced to another group that is handling kind of the building and the distribution of the boxes?

Jenny Curtis: No. We’re really small. We do all of it in-house. I mean, we don’t manufacture the products directly. But everything else, we do in-house. We source the products. We work with the manufacturers. We have them shipped in. We build the physical boxes here at our warehouse in Southern California. We ideate the entire curation of the box from start to finish. Everything is completely handmade and curated, again, for these different ages and, basically, different learning methods for each of the ages.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. I mean, this sounds like a pretty big challenge just from a supply chain standpoint because all those disparate objects have to get to you at the right time.

Jenny Curtis: That has been such a learning curve. As we’ve moved from single item orders to, I mean, our boxes, you know, they contain 12 to 15 components each and at three different ages, and then we change them out every month, so it is a lot to manage and coordinate. We have delays just like every other small company. And we just had an entire shipment go missing due to the Microsoft outages, so it’s somewhere in the U.S. We don’t know where it is. So, all of our boxes this month are going out in plain craft boxes. So, we have our challenges for sure.

Jenny Curtis: And just coming into business with a passion compared to coming into business with a business background, there has been the largest learning curve. I’m so grateful that we are still here, still standing and making a positive influence because it has just been a whirlwind of mistakes. And looking at it again, how can we improve this? Who can we bring on to help us make this better so we don’t make this mistake again? It’s just been an amazing experience learning how to work with so many different, amazing people, and bringing the right people on to help us out, because I don’t come from a business background. I come from a zoology background.

Lee Kantor: Right. That’s why when you were telling me that and then you were listing how many items were in there, in my head, I’m like, that is not for the faint of heart there, because that is a lot of disparate things that have their own timeline to arrive in a box that’s supposed to go out the first of the month.

Jenny Curtis: It’s definitely been a challenge. Supply chain has been interesting ever since COVID. I mean, COVID shut things down for a bit and then it was so expensive to get things back on track. And, now, it’s just getting everything on time and hopefully not losing things along the way.

Lee Kantor: And then, this business, there’s a cause behind it, right? You’re donating a lot of the proceeds.

Jenny Curtis: We do. We donate 50 percent of profits back to wildlife conservation. So, each month, we either partner with or donate to a wildlife conservation that’s related to the animal of the month. So, for instance, this month it was sea otter. We already sold out. So, those boxes are completely sold out. And our paired conservation partner is the Marine Conservation Institute, working to protect sea otter habitat. And what we found is that’s, first of all, a great impact we can make in donating financially to them. Every company needs money. Every nonprofit needs money. But not just that, we are sharing their story. We’re creating more awareness for them.

Jenny Curtis: And what I’ve found when I was working at Moorpark College as a professor teaching the conservation course, one of the big problems that conservations are having is they are having financial troubles, but there’s also a lot of awareness troubles. They’re not set up for, you know, social media and public relations in that way necessarily. So, anything we can do to get eyeballs on them is going to help them in the long run.

Jenny Curtis: Not to mention that our shoppers are also like micro donors to them as well. So, it’s a wonderful win-win. We’re helping the conservation out, we’re saving animals, and we’re teaching kids about empathy and animals at an early age and, hopefully, into their hopeful career desire of working with animals.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned some partners that are obviously conservation partners, are you also partnering with schools and elementary schools and folks that are kind of dealing with young children?

Jenny Curtis: Yeah. So, that’s an area that we definitely have opportunity for growth in. Right now, what we’ve done so far is we’ve done a lot of charter schools and homeschool organizations, that type of thing. But we haven’t really broken into the public school zone yet, and that’s just, again, due to our small team. We’re working on getting there every day, but at this point we’re only about four or five employees. And we just brought on a new operations manager, an integrator, actually, and we’re very excited because she’s going to be able to help us scale the way that we know we need to go. And schools and PTAs, and organizations like that are just definitely the next step for us.

Lee Kantor: So, when you take this leap into this world and then you start building the boxes and you start sending them out, when did you kind of have that moment where you’re like, “You know what? I think we’re on to something. I think this is something that’s going to eventually turn into the thing we want it to.”

Jenny Curtis: It’s funny because it’s always been the thing. It was just figuring out how to get it out, how to produce it and get it to the masses. I knew this is what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with it. It was just logistically a nightmare to try to switch gears. I mean, we started out selling on Amazon, and then getting some bundle ideas from what people were buying together on Amazon. And then from there, making our own website. And then, it was just so many steps to get to where we’re at now.

Jenny Curtis: But I always knew I wanted to continue the wildlife education journey. I want to help kids who were like me, and maybe a little lost with what they love about animals, or why they love them, or what they can do with that, and take it into something that they understand they can go into a successful career with. There’s no shortage of jobs in conservation. There’s no shortage of jobs in science. And getting kids on that path is really the whole goal behind this.

Lee Kantor: So, what was the reason you decided to become part of the WBEC-West community? What were you looking to get from that relationship?

Jenny Curtis: Yeah. So, we wanted to get women-owned and certified just because there’s a lot of people who say they are, but maybe they aren’t really. And we just wanted the certification to really show like, “Hey, we’ve gone through the wringer on this. We really are women-owned and women certified and completely legit.” It was important for me, especially as an advocate for conservation, because in the world of wildlife conservation, oftentimes the greatest impact that they can have on protecting the species is working with the local communities and working with the women in those communities to make that impact.

Jenny Curtis: So, I wanted to be here in solidarity and be like I’m here working as a woman-owned business to help create jobs and improve communities for all of these countries that are facing difficulties. And, obviously, it transfers into the animals having troubles and becoming endangered in one way from habitat loss or even poaching. So, to me, being women-owned certified was just really important to kind of have it come full circle and really show that we’re here doing what we say we’re doing.

Lee Kantor: So, what do you need more of? How can we be helping you?

Jenny Curtis: Subscribers are always lovely. We do have a subscription service. You can prepay, you can subscribe monthly. But another thing I just like to talk about is encourage kids to go into a science career. Encourage kids to just follow whatever interests they have. I mean, if they’re not interested in science, don’t push them in that direction. But if they are, there’s resources out there.

Jenny Curtis: When I was in high school, I remember going to the career center, you know, the career room and being like, I want to be a zookeeper. And they had nothing for me. Absolutely nothing. So, I mean, just the more information that’s out there now, help your kids find resources for things that they’re interested in, things they might want to do continued education for, help them get involved. It’s so vital at an early age to support their path and to have them be confident and kind of ahead of the game when able in these careers.

Lee Kantor: So, if somebody wants to learn more and connect with you, what’s a website or what’s the best way to connect on socials?

Jenny Curtis: Yeah, absolutely. So, it’s just edzoocation.com and most of our socials are @edzoocation_boxes and you can find us there. We kind of are a little bit of everywhere right now. We’re on Facebook and TikTok and Instagram. You can find us on YouTube with some of our videos. And obviously our website has all of our current product offerings. But we do have a new animal every month and it’s a really fun deep dive into that animal.

Lee Kantor: And that’s E-D-Z-O-O-C-A-T-I-O-N -.com?

Jenny Curtis: That’s right.

Lee Kantor: Well, Jenny, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Jenny Curtis: Thank you so much. We really appreciate being here. Thank you again.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.