Entrepreneurs: Dynamic duo who’ve become TV stars with their Messy approach to teaching science

If Sophie Dauvois and Rachel Ortas have their way, Peppa Pig will soon quit her job as a toddler TV idol, move to a sty and retire. For the duo are the creators of Okido, an independent, science-based children’s magazine starring a monster called Messy that’s spawned a popular CBeebies programme, live kids’ events and toy spin-offs.

“We want Messy to inspire all children throughout the world about science in the same way that Peppa has become a household name. We want to create the next generation of scientists,” says Dauvois, 56.

It’s an unusual ambition for a kids’ TV series but Okido stands out in the pink, cartoon-packed, plastic freebie-loaded world of children’s magazines. It’s made of recycled paper and edible, vegetable ink (“we thought kids might eat or chew the magazine and decided it should be safe if they did,” laughs Dauvois).

It all started in her flat in Brixton, where she and 58-year-old Ortas — the two are also life partners — created Okido after a three-week holiday in Marrakesh spent endlessly re-reading the same book with Dauvois’ son Emil, who was then five and is now 17.

“It sparked the idea of a great magazine with lots of things to do, and to read, and to learn about science,” says Dauvois, whose background is in genetics. “Children are curious about science and ask lots of questions. The idea was to create a magazine which would inspire their scientific interest and stimulate their creativity.

“But when I looked at the children’s magazines in the shops, they had cheap plastic toys which would go in the bin straight away, and a lifespan of about two minutes. They were very gender stereotyped, plus if you wrote on the glossy pages it would rub off on your hand. I thought kids deserved better.”

At the time, Paris-born Dauvois, who has two science PhDs and previously worked for Cancer Research UK, had moved into science education, working at Hackney City learning centre. Ortas, who is Spanish, was working as artist-in-residence at art college Central St Martins. They invested £5000 of savings into a first issue of Okido (the name is a mishmash of “kid” and “okey-dokey”) with a print run of 2000, and artwork by student designers and illustrators from St Martins.

At the start, Dauvois adds, “everybody had other jobs to support the project”. The first issue took the duo and their students eight months to produce, and the first stockists were shops who already sold Ortas’ illustrated cards, such as Tate Modern and the Design Museum. Two years later, the two won a distribution deal that saw Okido hit Waterstones and WH Smith.

It took two Wellcome Trust awards, together worth £140,000 to put Okido on a financially sustainable footing. Today it takes four weeks to work on each monthly edition, usually full of games, stories and recipes, with Messy monster learning about a theme such as the human body or mammals, or genes, or renewable energy.

it’s serious work, but Okido HQ involves “lots of fun testing all our games and activities”, Dauvois adds. “The best was eating the ammunition of our marshmallow catapult — the worst trying to eat the magazine to check it’s as edible as we say it is.” Now the magazine has a print run of 8000, although they are considering stopping selling from newsstands in the new year: “we hate the waste. Hundreds of copies can be pulped. It’s awful; we want to lower our carbon footprint.”

Messy’s small-screen stardom began in 2011: a sister of one of Okido’s staff worked for production company Squint/Opera, which conjured up a TV show based on Messy and the magazine’s other characters.

Okido signed a joint venture with Squint/Opera and raised £1.3 million from angels, mainly clients, family and friends, before CBeebies snapped up the rights to the CGI-animated show.