Uitgeverij Wilde Haren

Where they stood

Loulou Drinkwaard and D'Avellonne van Dijk founded Uitgeverij Wilde Haren in the summer of 2020 with one goal: publishing children's books where inclusivity is the norm, with illustrations that reflect society as it actually is. They are one of the few inclusive children's book publishers in the Netherlands.

What began as a passion project grew into a serious player. And that is exactly where the problem sat: popular titles such as Plons! were bought mainly through third parties. Every sale passed through a middleman, at a lower margin and without any customer contact.

They sold well. They just did not sell it themselves.

In a market dominated by Bol.com and Bruna, a small publisher can never win on advertising budget, range or brand awareness. Search for "buy children's books" and you end up at the big shops. That is not a matter of trying harder.

What we did

Build

Two web shops were built in total. The first made direct sales possible; the second was rebuilt around what had been learned in the meantime about how people actually choose a children's book.

Both in Shopify. The first was fully custom: designed in Figma first, then built into its own Shopify shop with Liquid. The second was set up on a template. The design follows the colourful identity of the books, and the filter structure was custom-built so you can search by age, theme and season.

Specific to a publisher is the pre-order functionality that was built: crucial for a publisher's cash flow, and it shows how popular a new title will be before it goes to print.

Fill

Not competing on "children's books", but on what Wilde Haren alone has. Ask an AI for a publisher of diverse, multicultural children's books in the Netherlands and you are asking a question Bol.com is not a good answer to; it sells everything, and therefore nothing in particular. The content was built on exactly those questions.

Convert

The filter structure and the pre-order function do the work here: getting to the right book faster, and being able to buy what does not exist yet. After launch the collaboration continued as monthly technical SEO and optimisation: a web shop is never finished.

What came out

Ask an AI for children's books that reflect the diversity of the Netherlands, and Wilde Haren surfaces more often than Bol.com and Bruna. In Google AI Overviews they hold almost four times Bol.com's share.

And that is not a snapshot: at the start of the measurement period their domain was barely cited at all. The entire position was built in a matter of months.

The number that matters most to a publisher is moving too: book sales are rising, and increasingly through their own shop rather than through third parties.