The textbooks that Maria Möller developed together with her friend Laura Mohn are square, colorful and as thin as a brochure.

If you leaf through it, you will see, for example, how two hands shape the gesture for Ball.

With this idea, the two of them had only won the City of Frankfurt's Founders' Prize a few weeks ago and thus won 12,500 euros in prize money.

Now Mohn and Möller were hoping for 100,000 euros - and offered investors 15 percent in the television program “Die Höhle der Löwen”. 

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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They are not the first founders from Hessen to try to attract TV investors: The pizza dough baker Lizza, the account app Finanzguru and the anti-migraine sleep mask Mysleepmask have already made lucrative deals with prominent donors such as Carsten Maschmeyer and Nick in recent years Complete Heidfeld and Ralf Dümmel. However, other applicants also failed, such as the bike spoke advertising agency Bikuh. “We let our hands speak,” is how the founders explain their concept. Every tenth child in Germany has a hearing impairment. But the book is intended for all daycare children so that inclusion can succeed. A Talking Hands app is also being tested, with which signs can be looked up, but can also be learned with guessing games. 

"That is downright adorable," praised the former television manager Georg Kofler. That is not a cramped inclusion. Shopping TV queen Judith Williams thinks it is sensational and clever. “Total respect,” adds Dagmar Wöhrl. And has an idea: She won't invest herself, but will buy the books for her foundation for 10,000 euros. Carsten Maschmeyer, Judith Williams and Georg Kofler immediately follow this approach. “You are not a classic investment case, but you definitely deserve funding,” says Kofler, explaining this unusual form of financing. "The lion's den has never done that before."  

Laura Mohn developed the flip books as a student: when she appeared for her final exam two years ago at the European School of Design in Frankfurt, she had 100 of the slim flip books with her. The budding communication designer calls her project “Talking Hands”. The pictures show the movement sequences of the sign-supported communication according to Etta Wilken, which is intended to help children with difficulties in language acquisition to use accompanying signs to use spoken language. Such a developmental delay occurs frequently in children with Down syndrome, among others. Mohn's flip books form a kind of basic vocabulary for toddlers, based on Wilken's method.

She worked on it for nights, sometimes until six in the morning, to perfect each of the roughly two thousand drawings. At that time, her college friend Maria Möller was particularly at her side with advice and coffee. Both live in Berlin at the time. The workload didn't bother her much, says the twenty-six-year-old today. “I just love it.” Maybe also because she was born with this love. Her mother and her older sister, who has Down syndrome, are both artistically active.

The idea for the final thesis was inspired by the story of her sister. When she was little, the family used their own made-up gestures to communicate. Mohn says of herself that she only learned the method of sign-supported communication afterwards. With her final project, she wanted to create something that would make communication easier for children with and without disabilities in a visually appealing way.

She passed the test well, in spite of the tendinitis that Mohn had got from drawing. After graduation, she never lets go of the idea of ​​pursuing the project. She asks Maria Möller for advice again, and she doesn't hesitate for long. Unsatisfied with her job in a Berlin advertising agency, Möller packs her things and moves back to Frankfurt. The study project should become a business model. Mohn acts as a creative head, Möller takes care of the day-to-day business. In February 2020, the young women will publish their flip books on their own website. Many kindergartens answer, but also speech therapists, medical practices and parents of children with Down syndrome or other problems with language acquisition.

Despite the pandemic, things have been steadily improving since the website was activated.

The two have been members of the Unibator funding program at Frankfurt's Goethe University since June 2020.

The founders are financing the first edition entirely out of their own pockets.

A printer in Bad Nauheim prints them with non-toxic inks on resilient voluminous paper.

The result of a learning curve, says Möller.

"We have lived a little bit into the world of paper." The feedback from the Frankfurt Green Sauce daycare center in particular helped them to optimize the products.

For example, they would have made the flip books smaller again so that small children's hands could hold them better.