Hello!
Welcome to my first ever blog post!
Let me introduce myself my name is James Davison and I am the owner and founder of Progressive Play. Progressive Play is an independently driven creative media studio with a focus on creating family friendly products such as illustrated picture books, social impact games and short form animation the purpose of which is to use fictionalised storytelling to address real world social issues such as mental health, representation and acceptance.
Above you can see the titular character of my children's book "Mindy's Journey" - an allegorical tale of a girl who is suffering from a period of depression who one day falls to sleep only to wake up lost and alone in a cave. Whilst in the cave she befriends a star that has fallen to earth and the two of them escape together learning to communicate how each of them are feeling in the process.
As the title implies Mindy goes on a journey, both an emotional one as well as physical, in the story. My time running a business has been a journey in and of itself - starting as an idea when I was studying at Universiy (Mindy's Journey was originally conceived as a game idea), to originally starting out solely focused on making games, to suffering immense imposter syndrome and identity crisis whilst I was apart of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, to restructuring the business to focus on children's books and now about to launch my business in ernest with help from the Prince's Trust, all of this whilst raising 4 children and dealing with my own struggles with mental health (I suffer from Tourette's Syndrome, Non Epileptic Attack Disorder, Affective Dysregulation and like Mindy have suffered from bouts of depression).
Needless to say that it hasn't been an easy path to get here but whilst I've struggled I have also had a lot of support and now I get to take a new step in my journey towards building a brand that uses the power of storytelling to empower children and adults to talk about social issues such as mental health. Although it is a daunting task I am excited to take the journey and for anyone reading this I hope that you will come on that journey with me!