Serious Kids CEO Genevieve Dexter discusses how the recently rebranded children’s distributor is expanding into new areas, such as direct-to-consumer.

Genevieve Dexter

Genevieve Dexter’s boutique distributor Serious Kids, formerly known as Serious Lunch, underwent a rebrand last year after evolving from an executive production outfit into a distribution company five years ago.

According to Dexter, the change reflects a need for the business to more clearly represent its core focus and what it does.

“We felt Serious Lunch was more about putting deals together and we needed to have a name for a distributor that actually says what we do. If you think about it, a lot of the kids distributors’ names don’t actually tell you what they do,” she says.

As part of the rebrand, the company is also increasing its direct-to-consumer focus. “We have our own portal on Amazon now and we’re thinking about OTT; we need to be able to have a direct-to-consumer brand that means something,” Dexter adds.

The move is part of multiple plans Dexter says she has in order to keep up with an ever-evolving industry, although she stresses that working with public broadcasters is still an essential part of the strategy.

“I like to be able to have at least five or six different plans because the world changes in unexpected ways – as we’ve experienced in an unprecedented way recently – and you’ve got to be super flexible and fast,” she says.

“Direct-to-consumer is one of our strategies, but public broadcasters are still key clients. We’ve been doing a lot of major deals with the BBC recently, which have been fuelling our growth.”

Earlier this year, Serious Kids appointed Endeavor Content executive Ondrej Zemanec as sales manager, growing the company from a team of two to six in the space of a year. As the firm expands, it is looking to invest in new properties to build its slate of acquisitions.

While Dexter says she is not keen on having “hundreds and hundreds” of hours of content, preferring to focus on “high-quality programming in a fairly restricted category,” the rebrand does allow Serious Kids to potentially branch out into different genres.

“It gives us an opportunity to launch different areas. So, for example, we could have Serious Drama or Serious Manga or Serious Comedy,” she says.

Tik Tak has been sold to pubcasters around the world

In the meantime, Dexter says she is looking to acquire content that buyers wouldn’t expect or programmes that supplement existing IP in Serious Kids’ catalogue.

“The main consideration for us is that we don’t cannibalise our own catalogue, and the key thing is [we bring something to each market that] buyers don’t expect,” she says. Sometimes the company finds a show that turns out to be more successful than it thought it would be and so it looks for more of the same, she adds.

One example of the latter is non-dialogue, live-action preschool series Tik Tak, which Dexter says she thought would become a direct-to-consumer digital offering but “ended up selling to every single major public broadcaster in the world.”

“I’d like to supplement Tik Tak with something else in that range, so we can develop the relationships with the buyers that have acquired the show and provide them with more content in the same vein,” she adds.

Other programmes on Serious Kids’ slate include high-end live-action adventure series The New Legends of Monkey and upcoming hybrid stop-frame animation/live-action preschool show The Sound Collector, which the distributor is taking to Mipcom this year ahead of its premiere on ITV in the UK and Rai in Italy.

Meanwhile, Dexter adds that she is looking for a box set of specials, “a unique collection where each one has to be a jewel in that collection, but be complementary to everything else.”

Next year, Dexter says she may look to hire some more people for the sales and business affairs teams and hopes to build on the success Serious Kids has had in the past two years.

“In the last couple of years, we’ve doubled our turnover and tripled our profitability,” she says. “That’s quite a hard act to follow, but we’d like three years of that type of performance under our belt. That would make me happy.”