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Customisable, inclusive, and magical books for every family.

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About the Company & Customer Challenges

You Are The Star Books is reimagining personalised children’s publishing, where every child becomes the hero of their own story. Traditional personalised book platforms were slow, expensive, and difficult to scale:

  • Manual design and rendering meant books took weeks to produce.

  • Limited customisation left families unable to truly reflect their child’s identity.

  • Publishers needed a way to handle large order volumes with the same ease of use as modern e-commerce platforms.

Info

How the Solution Works

I built a fully automated, cloud-native pipeline that brings creativity and scalability together:

  • Automated book builder: Python scripts layer characters, backgrounds, and text into high-quality storybook pages.

  • Frontend integration: Parents and publishers can input custom details that flow directly into the backend, ensuring a real-time, personalised experience.

  • Asset management: Thousands of 3D-rendered layers are validated automatically to guarantee quality and completeness.

  • Cloud infrastructure: Deployed on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Firestore for schemas, Cloud Functions for automation, and GCS for storage.

  • Publishing workflow: Pages are compiled into print-ready PDFs and delivered directly to publishers.

  • Personalisation at scale: Hair, skin tone, body type, and family details can be fully customised, making each book unique and inclusive.

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Key Achievements

  • Reduced production time from days to minutes, making a personalised book system truly scalable.

  • Created a system that is easier to update and extend than standard publishing platforms, enabling quick integration of new books, characters, fonts, or languages.

  • Delivered a seamless publishing pipeline, reducing manual overhead and cutting costs for both the company and its partners.

  • Made it possible to produce thousands of unique books efficiently, opening the door to both direct-to-consumer sales and large publisher partnerships.

© 2025 by Nick Hughes

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