On Monday the girl-centered media brand Rebel Girls announced an $8 million Series A funding round led by publishing giant Penguin Random House that will help the company expand to television, theater, and even the metaverse.
Rebel Girls, a certified B Corporation whose mission is to inspire girls through women-focused content including podcasts and books, says it already reaches 23 million girls. Jes Wolfe, CEO and chairperson, says the company hopes to reach an audience of 50 million by 2025 as it continues to publish new books and expand into new media and storytelling formats. All the while, Rebel Girls will continue combating the lingering confidence gap between boys and girls.
“The state of girls is not good, and coming out of the pandemic it’s worse than it was,” she tells Fast Company, pointing to statistics showing that girls face higher rates of depression and cyberbullying. “This confidence gap is a real thing.”
Rebel Girls’ internal customer surveys show the company’s books help to combat those mental health pitfalls, with 92% of parents reporting their girls were inspired by the books, and 86% saying their girls’ confidence had increased since they started reading them. The books, which began in 2016 with the crowdfunded Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, are often introduced to girls by their parents around age 4. As they grow older, young readers come to see them as their own, Wolfe says.
Additional digital content will be available on other kid-friendly platforms by the end of 2023, Wolfe says, as will a new virtual world initiative.
“I think you’ll see us in the metaverse in the second half of this year,” she says, with details to be announced in the near future. “We’ll have something on Roblox and we’ll have something on Minecraft.”
Those platforms can also help build communities around Rebel Girls, something Wolfe says the company already sees with fans interacting in reviews and comments on the existing podcasts, as well as in real-life events.
“We’re seeing a lot of book clubs,” she says. “We’re seeing birthday parties.”
Rebel Girls is also slated to begin rolling out fiction stories focusing on modern-day, early-teen girls and positive female friendships, starting next year. There’s even a Broadway show, also featuring early teens, in the works. Graphic novels are in the pipeline for 2025, and this May, the brand is releasing its first foray into what Wolfe calls “prescriptive nonfiction,” with a guidebook called Growing Up Powerful designed to help steer girls through puberty.
Since the first volume of Good Night Stories, Rebel Girls has released books focused on women in business, women fighting to protect the Earth, and inspiring mother-daughter pairs. Rebel Girls Rock, a title exploring women musicians from Dolly Parton to Lizzo, comes out Tuesday with a foreword by rock star Joan Jett, who’s among the investors in the Series A round. The company plans to hire a new chief content officer to manage the growing assortment of material and modes of reading audiences.
“I think there’s so much potential under the Rebel Girls umbrella,” Wolfe says. “There are so many types of stories to tell and ways to tell them.”
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