NOMINATED BY SARAH GUERETTE, CEI
Alli Harper started OurShelves, an expert-curated children’s book box company that features under-represented children and families, from a personal place. Alli’s children have two moms, and it’s been much too hard to find children’s books that include LGBTQ+ families like hers. She also struggled to find children’s books featuring the many other kids and families who remain under-represented due to their race, skin color, ethnicity, religion, and many other aspects of identity. Alli quickly learned she was not alone in seeking out and having trouble finding these books. It turned out there are many families, teachers, librarians, healthcare providers, and others who know how important it is for both under-represented and marginalized children to find themselves in the books they enjoy – and also for all children to be introduced to, to relate to, to connect with, and to empathize with the many different wonderful kids and families in our world through children’s books.
Fundamentally, OurShelves helps make it easier to share high-quality and expert-curated children’s books that cultivate its audience’s values and vision for a world in which all children and all families belong on OurShelves, and most importantly, all children and all families belong in our communities.
Guided by this vision, Alli founded OurShelves, which ships quarterly subscription book boxes as well as one-time book boxes to families, teachers, and others who care for children aged 0 – 8. Her goal is both to connect these expert-curated books to the audiences struggling to find them and also, through this collective purchasing, to help organize and prove the significant and growing market for these books. OurShelves is also committed to sharing and uplifting the voices of under-represented authors and illustrators.
After launching the business in 2018, Alli worked with both SCORE and the Women’s Business Center to expand her customer base and use new tools to enter more markets. At launch, OurShelves operated out of Alli’s home, but the guidance from SCORE and the WBC allowed Alli to quickly put plans for growth into place. With expert insights from the Resource Partners, Alli implemented new marketing strategies, built her online presence, expanded technical capacity and infrastructure, connected to more publishers, and used customer feedback to expand and improve offerings to continue to meet customers’ needs. These changes allowed OurShelves to outgrow their home-based operations and shift to fulfillment partners to pack and ship their orders.
With incoming requests from prospective customers throughout the world since the launch of OurShelves, one major hurdle OurShelves has faced was having the capacity and resources to learn how to expand to international markets to meet this demand. As a small business, OurShelves did not have internal expertise around navigating international taxes and duties, international shipping logistics, and effective marketing messages for different countries. With significant and invaluable support from the Maine International Trade Center and others, the OurShelves team was proud to gain the skills, knowledge, partners, and confidence to overcome some of these initial hurdles to launch their products abroad. OurShelves will continue to learn and grow to meet the ever-increasing international demand for these books so that all kids and all families know they belong on OurShelves and in their communities throughout the world.
With a steadfast commitment to her values, an insatiable appetite for learning, a willingness to seek advice from experts at SBA Resource Partners, and success in overcoming hurdles to launch international offerings, Alli Harper continues to grow OurShelves into a small business meeting important customer needs. In recognition of her incredibly effective, persistent, and creative use of resources to connect these books to the wide-ranging audiences seeking them, the SBA is pleased to name OurShelves as the 2025 Small Business Exporter for Maine.
