It was 5:30 in the morning, I was driving into NYC for my first Yearbook meeting of the day. Suddenly, I got an idea. It didn’t come to me like any other idea I have ever had, I actually felt it arrive! It sorta hurt.
My name is Tom Kehoe. I have been a Yearbook Representative for over 40 years. I love Yearbooks and I have loved working with my schools, helping them create exceptional books. Because I visit my schools every three weeks, I have developed a close relationship with my Advisors and Staff. Going to work for me has always been more like spending the day visiting my friends.
For the past few years, however, I have been sensing changes in the industry and in my schools. There has been a growing number of students who are not finding the Yearbook relevant. The number of books ordered in my schools has been receding, not by much, but enough to suggest a trend is developing.
When I began this marvelous career in 1976, the students I was working with were called Generation X. They were the first ‘Latch-Key Kids,’ very individualistic, cynical of major institutions, and had a deep desire to learn, explore, and make a difference. Then came the Millennials. They were born into an analog world but matured into a digital world. They respect authority, prefer to work in teams, and envision the world as a 24/7 place. Both generations loved the printed Yearbook.
Just after the turn of the century, Generation Z arrived. They were/are multicultural, environmentally respectful, and… the first generation to be born digitally native! When my sons (Millennials) were little and acting up in a restaurant, I handed them a crayon and a paper placemat and asked them to draw a rocket ship. Recalcitrant Gen Z youngsters are handed a cell phone. They now spend an average of almost 8 hours a day interacting with those cell phones. As a teenager, I had a record collection that filled three boxes, a photo album that had almost forty bulky, plastic pages of pictures, and anything now called ‘videos’ were movies that I watched on a tiny black and white TV or saw in a theatre.
Now, Generation Z carries all of that around in their pockets! They want anything that can be on their cell phones to be on their cell phones. I get it. And that was the idea that slammed into my head at 5:30 that fateful morning. Generation Z wants their Yearbooks on their cell phones!
When I got home that evening, I booted up my computer and began to learn everything I could about building a shiny new company. I learned how to write a business plan (my first one was 61 pages, and it got whittled down to 6) and then I began to design what I knew was going to be something special, a Cloud-Based Digital Yearbook!
Initially, I struggled with how to get one of those beautiful layouts I so enjoyed helping create for my schools jammed into a 6-inch screen. It didn’t take long for me to realize that a 9 x 12 Yearbook doesn’t have any business being on a 6-inch screen. It just ain’t right. I had to walk away from the form factor I had been working with my entire adult life.
Then I had another revelation. It didn’t exactly slam into my head this time, but it was equally profound. The pictures, I realized, were more important than the layouts. When I design layouts for one of my schools, I am more focused on what the page will look like because I don’t have an emotional connection to the students. Other than my Yearbook Staff, I don’t know anyone else in the school.
While my ego let me believe that the print Yearbooks I was helping to create were so popular because of my amazing designs, reality suggested to me that it was the PICTURES that excited everyone. I forgot what the Mission Statement for a Yearbook is… Preserving Memories! I was now free to focus on the pictures.
Every picture in an Idiom Yearbook is celebrated on its own, all backlit and beautiful. Well, that revelation was one of many revelations that have led to, and here comes my ego again, a completely new and spectacular Yearbook experience.
Gen Z wants video in their yearbook, they want prom and graduation in their yearbook, they want to brand themselves in their yearbook, they want to stay connected in their yearbook, they want to access their yearbook when they want to access it… they don’t want their yearbook to end up in a box like their parents’ yearbook. They want THE NEXT GENERATION YEARBOOK they have been denied for too long.
THAT is why I created YearBoxx.
