Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, co-authors of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, set out to add equality and empowerment in children’s bedtime stories. Believing that every girl can be whatever she wants to be, the authors created a two-part series of bedtime stories, shifting the focus from fictional princesses to inspirational and true stories of women from all over the world.

What they didn’t expect was to create an empire through the most successful crowdfunded children’s series to date.

Kickstarting the Good Night Series

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women went live on Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity and the arts, in May of 2016. The authors’ original goal for their crowdfunding page was $40,000 – which was met within days. The initial Kickstarter launch for their first book brought in over $675,000 during the campaign, setting a record for the most crowdfunded children’s book in Kickstarter history. Because of their success on the Kickstarter platform, the authors brought the story to Indiegogo, another crowdfunding platform, and raised another $325,000, bringing their crowdfunding total to over $1 million dollars.

Favilli and Cavallo didn’t stop there, though. Since their first book, they’ve done two more rounds of crowdfunding. In June of 2017, they launched their second campaign on Kickstarter for a second volume, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2. Their project raised over $100,000 in just three hours. By September 2018, the authors launched their third Kickstarter campaign for “I Am a Rebel Girl: A Journal to Start Revolutions.” It surpassed its target of $100,000 in pre-order in eight short hours. While raising over $1.7 million on crowdfunding platforms in just three years, Favilli and Cavallo have sold over 3.5 million books in more than 70 countries and translated them into over a dozen languages, creating a global phenomenon based on feminism, equality, and creativity. 

Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo – The Names Behind Rebel Girls

The messages about real world women in the Rebel Girls books continue to inspire young girls around the world – as do the authors’ background stories. Both born in Italy, the two connected in Milan while they worked as journalists, directors, and playwrights. Coming together in their mid-30s, the two formed Timbuktu Labs, a children’s media company, which led them to winning awards that brought them to San Francisco.

During their time in Silicon Valley, they felt the oppressive nature of being two women in the heart of startup culture. They were often the only two women in the room, or they were told they’d never be able to raise enough capital for their desired projects. Their experience with their media company in the Bay Area, alongside their aspirations to share meaningful feminist empowerment stories, led to the creation of the Rebel Girls series. They wanted to celebrate being a woman in this day and age, while also highlighting the pain and suffering women continue to endure – they wanted the series to be realistic, rather than another fairytale where the woman sits around waiting for a man to save her.

Timbuktu founders Elena Favilli (l.) and Francesca Cavallo

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls – Empowering the Next Generation

Both books in the Rebel Girls series focus on real world women from history – bringing to life the feminine as well as the realistic and diverse. The volumes highlight iconic figures like Rosa Parks, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Serena Williams, Julia Child, Yusra Mardini, Coco Chanel, and Malala Yousafzai, to name a few. They inspire children, with each biography told in a fairytale style. Favilli and Cavallo’s goal was to include as many women from different backgrounds, careers, circumstances, and ethnicities as possible so that young readers could see themselves in the pages. Alongside the text sits artistic renderings, further sparking the reader’s imagination.

While the Rebel Girls books continue to promote female empowerment, creativity, and bravery, the story of Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo truly proves how any and every woman has the potential to affect the world. Overcoming adversity, pushing through the negativity, and innovating, the authors have become influential women themselves – while engaging with and sharing stories about influential women within their book’s pages.