She was an accountant who, in 2019, had just left her career to care for her then two-year-old. As a stay-at-home-mother, Priscilla Tan wanted to read inspiring books about female role models to her daughter.
Frustrated that she could not find many such books that were age-appropriate for her toddler, she decided to write her own.
Together with her husband Shawn, she ran a Kickstarter campaign in early 2020 to fund it, raising more than S$60,000. This caught the attention of book publisher Marshall Cavendish, which offered the Tans a publishing contract.
In 2020, they launched six board books under their Leaders series, featuring among them, Singapore’s first female president Halimah Yacob, former American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
In 2022, the couple launched their Activists series, also six books. It featured women such as Academy Award-winning actress Michelle Yeoh, Pakistani women’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai, and the former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama.