Nancy Traversy
Nancy came from a family who liked to design, paint and create and discovered her own love of colour and design in her mid twenties. Bizarrely she also loved numbers and ended up with a business degree and a job in Price Waterhouse in London. Not quite fitting the mould there, she left in 1986 to work in a more artistic environment in a small design house in Covent Garden. She remained in the design industry for seven years where she learned the ropes of running a creative entrepreneurial business and, in the late eighties, made her first acquisition of a graphic design company from Richard Branson’s Virgin Communications Group. During this time, she was travelling frequently on business trips to the Far East and developed her passion for world culture and travel. When her eldest daughter was born in 1992, Nancy started her own consultancy practice helping small creative start-ups. She met Tessa Strickland and together they launched Barefoot Books with the help of Margaret Thatcher’s Business Expansion Scheme. As a new mum and an avid explorer of world cultures, she was immediately captivated by the idea of publishing books for children that celebrated diversity and imagination. In 2001, she decided to cross the Atlantic to be closer to Barefoot’s North American business. Since then, she travels frequently to Europe and makes her home in Concord, MA with her husband, four children, now 19, 17, 16 and 14, three cats and lots of colour!
