What were you doing when you were 16? Wearing too much foundation? Stressing over your GCSEs? Me too. Not Beau Jessop though - she’s set up her own business, earning a cool £48,000 last year. Jealous.
Beau set up the website SpecialName.cn following a trip to China, where she was asked repeatedly to suggest English names to expecting parents.
Following the scrapping of the ‘one child’ policy in 2015, there is an increasing trend for Chinese children to be given a second, English name to use on emails and for business and study in the West, because traditional names using the Chinese alphabet can’t be used. Beau noticed that a lot of Chinese parents were picking culturally inappropriate names after she met children called Cinderella, Gandalf and Rolex (imagine that on the register at school!)
The website asks parents to pick from 12 personality traits based on their aspirations for the child (pressure!), and then offers parents a choice of names along with their meanings and celebrity namesakes.
It then shares the suggestions using the Chinese version of WhatsApp - We-Chat - to allow family and friends in on the action.
The site costs the equivalent of just 60p for three names, but with it averaging 27,000 visitors a month, profits are looking rather tidy.
As the daughter of Loose Women panelist Lisa Maxwell, Beau is used to the limelight. She’s staying grounded, though, telling the Daily Mail that she has ‘a target to reach which will allow me to pay for my university fees, and writing the text for the site was really good practice for my Mandarin GCSE.’
Hands up if you feel like you wasted your teenage years…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.