Rassi N Pang

After I got back to Jakarta from London, I decided to look for opportunities where I could start my own brand. I finally met a partner – who happened to be one of my best friends – who pitched the idea of publishing a children's book.

It took us one year to do our market and product research before we launch ‘Seumpama’. Today, Seumpama is a Jakarta based independent book-studio that creates, shares, and publishes books. It is no longer children-specific, but we have our personal interests in promoting good-quality children books through our channel.

As a bookstore we are mainly online based at www.seumpama.com with occasional pop-up stores/collaborative projects. Our book collections are mostly pre-loved titles that we curate and individually review for our followers, but we also aim to distribute more titles (pre-loved or new) that we think should be read and made. As a publisher, we are aiming to publish our second book this year, one that I will write and illustrate. We also plan to publish classic Indonesian titles and collaborate with new writers in the coming years. I act as a co-founder, as well as the writer and illustrator of our first published children book, “Terbang” (To Fly).

At the same time that I started working on Seumpama, I also decided to be a freelance interpreter. It is an old job that I have been going back and forth in between my old jobs, but this is the first time that I had been doing it full-time as a freelance. Initially, I just wanted to support my self with the independency of choosing my working hours, so I can dedicate more hours to work on Seumpama.

Most of my clients are market research companies so I also ended up refining my market research analytics, which I learned at Goldsmiths to be a valuable study to base business plans and actions. I learned to continuously observe and pay attention to market behaviours so our brand can be more tuned to the audience we want to speak to. So I have been enjoying gaining new insights of the market that I can use for my brand.