Monkey Music Brand Guidelines: A 1993 London Music Class, a Pink Monkey & a Franchise

A London class that became a franchise.

Monkey Music began in London in 1993, according to the company’s own listings, including one carried in Surrey County Council’s family directory and reviewed in December 2025. Its founder is Angie Coates. MadeForMums, in a guide to baby classes in Westminster first published in 2011 and updated in 2023, credits her with developing the music curriculum on which the classes are built.

The business became a franchise within five years. Its profile on What Franchise says it was “evolving into a franchise by 1998”, and the British Franchise Association’s member profile says the founder joined the association that year, describing her as one of the first female franchisors in the UK. The same profile lists Monkey Music as an established member since 2003 and says the founder is serving a third term on the association’s board.

The company behind the brand is Monkey Music Limited, which Companies House records as incorporated on 5 February 1996. It is an active private company with its registered office in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and the register classes it under pre-primary education. Companies House lists the founder among the persons with significant control of the company.

Several unrelated companies registered in England and Wales also carry “Monkey Music” in their names, so the franchise is identified here by its Harpenden-registered company and its own UK website. Its classes are aimed at children from birth to school age, the association profile says, which adds that the brand sets out to appeal to parents and carers as well as children.

Original songs and a pink monkey.

The product is a weekly music class for young children and the adults who bring them. The association profile presents it as pre-school and nursery music education, and describes a “5-stage progressive curriculum” made up of hundreds of original songs and age-specific musical activities, written for the brand by a team of musicians and child-development specialists; the What Franchise profile instead splits the weekly classes into four age groups. MadeForMums describes the Rock ’n’ Roll programme, for babies from 3 months, as gentle songs, soothing sounds and absorbing activities shared between parent and baby. The same guide places a Monkey Music class at St Michael’s Church in Belgravia, alongside entries for Water Babies and Gymboree. The association profile speaks of a fan base of “tens of thousands of young families each year”, and of franchisee forums that sit alongside the annual conference.

The character at the centre of the brand is a pink monkey. The association profile says the material “all spins round” it, and lists branded instruments and plush toys among the merchandise sold alongside the classes. Around the weekly session sit an online Monkey Music Club for members, holiday workshops, party entertainment, sessions in nurseries and downloadable albums, all as the profile lists them.

The voice is cheerful and musical. The brand promise quoted in the association profile is “to have fun and make music wherever we go”, and the franchise listing in Surrey’s directory closes with the line “Nurturing a Lifetime of Music”. Both are the company’s own words, and both lean on the same few ideas: music, fun and a long relationship with families.

How children’s class franchises present themselves.

Children’s swim, music and activity franchises sell a weekly class rather than a product, so their identities are built around the session itself. The swim schools present their lessons by age band: Turtle Tots divides its programme into baby, toddler, preschool and independent stages on its website, and Water Babies described parents in the pool as “assistant teachers” when Sports Management profiled it in 2016.

Photography carries much of the brand work. Water Babies sold underwater baby photography alongside its lessons by 2016, according to Sports Management, and pictures of parents and small children in the water are the companies’ own material. This guide reproduces none of those photographs and names no child, parent or teacher.

Naming does similar work. Programmes get names of their own: Turtle Tots calls its pregnancy yoga classes Turtle Tums, and in 2016 Water Babies called its programme for before and after birth WaterBumps. Mascots stretch the brand name further, and Turtle Tots introduced a turtle mascot and asked families to suggest its name. Booking is handled online, through lesson finders, regional location pages and customer portals of the kind on Turtle Tots’ website.

The corporate side speaks in a different register. Founder stories sit on “our story” and “about us” pages, and in the cases of Water Babies and Turtle Tots they begin with founders who were new parents themselves. Franchise pages set out territories, training and head-office support for prospective owners, while trade titles such as Startups.co.uk, TheBusinessDesk and Sports Management record licences, territories and changes of ownership. This guide keeps what those independent titles report apart from what each company says about itself.

A franchise network run from Hertfordshire.

The network is run as a franchise supported by a head-office team. The What Franchise profile says there are around 50 franchises across the UK teaching 12,000 children a week; the Surrey listing gives more than 10,000 families a week; and the association profile says that by its 30th year, in 2023, the business had delivered 3 million hours of classes. Franchisees are trained through a Monkey Music Training Academy, the profile says, with an annual franchise conference and awards and a “Teacher Fest” in the calendar. New franchisees receive intensive initial training and a tailored programme of support in their first year of trading, and training runs in a mix of face-to-face and online formats. The founder’s stated aim in franchising, the profile adds, was a flexible way of working for parents, with franchise owners setting their own hours around the weekly class timetable. The What Franchise profile says owners can either teach classes themselves or employ teachers trained by the head-office team, and that classes run through the school week; it also gives its own total of more than 4.8 million classes taught over 25 years.

Local businesses carry the name too. Companies House lists dissolved partnerships such as Monkey Music Weybridge LLP, closed in 2016, and a St Albans and Harpenden partnership that later changed its name, both following the same pattern of brand plus territory.

Recognition has come mainly from the franchise sector. The British Franchise Association profile says Monkey Music received the bronze award in the BFA HSBC Franchisor of the Year awards for 2022. Its What Franchise profile says it won two British Franchisor of the Year awards, in 2010 and 2013, and an Express Brand Builder of the Year award in 2005. These are the company’s own accounts of its awards.

For a design guide, Monkey Music shows how one character, a pink monkey, can carry a curriculum, a merchandise range and a franchise network at once. Compare Tumble Tots, a UK physical-play franchise for the same age group, and Gymboree, the American play-and-music class brand. For this guide we use a monkey pink, a deep plum and a banana yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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