Turtle Tots Brand Guidelines: The Bristol Baby Swim School Launched in 2011

A swim school that began with its own pool classes.

Turtle Tots is a baby, toddler and preschool swim school that runs as a franchise network in the UK and Ireland. It was founded by Gabrielle (Gaby) Lixton and Caroline Sparks. Startups.co.uk, profiling the pair as finalists for its Mumpreneur of the Year award in October 2013, said they launched Turtle Tots in 2011, with a programme that begins during pregnancy with aquanatal yoga and continues with specialist baby and toddler classes once the child is born.

The company says the founders began by opening their own swim school in Bristol, teaching babies, toddlers and children aged three and four, and that they had recently become parents themselves. It says it wanted a more child-centred kind of lesson, with teachers attuned to each child’s stage and activities adapted to suit. Turtle Tots Bristol, by the company’s account, soon became one of the larger swim schools in its region, and the founders then turned the business into a franchise company, giving other people the chance to run swim schools of their own under the Turtle Tots name.

Both founders came to it from the same trade. When Turtle Tots appeared in the Startups 100 list in July 2012, Startups.co.uk reported that Lixton had been a franchisee of another aqua-baby business, had noticed that many mothers lacked confidence introducing their babies to the water, and had devised a new type of class that also took in exercise before and after birth. Sparks, the site said, brought a background in marketing, and both had started and sold baby businesses before.

From licences to franchises.

Turtle Tots grew first by selling licences. In 2012 Startups.co.uk reported that within a year of launch the founders had signed a dozen licensees, teaching in more than 15 territories around the UK, and that the business had received funding from the European Regional Development Fund. In its 2013 profile, the same site described the model as selling licences and training people to run their own Turtle Tots businesses, each running the programme exclusively in a mapped territory, and said the brand was trademarked in the UK, Australia and Ireland.

The pace held. In May 2014, when Turtle Tots made the Startups 100 for the third year in a row, Startups.co.uk reported 29 licensees across 52 territories on a royalty model, nearly all of them mothers of young children, and said that the business had been approved as a licensor by Lloyds TSB the previous year. By then, the site reported, the brand had been trademarked in Australia, the USA and Ireland.

The programme is set out by age on the company’s website. Baby lessons run from birth to 14 months; toddler lessons from 14 months to three years; lessons for three- and four-year-olds continue with a parent in the water; and independent lessons take children aged five to seven. Before birth, the company runs Turtle Tums aquanatal yoga classes, which it describes as stretching, relaxation and breathing work supported by the water. It says much of its programme takes place above the surface, with underwater swimming introduced when a child is ready, and that classes are built around games and songs.

Teaching is presented as a selling point. The company says every Turtle Tots teacher completes a training course on how babies communicate before they can talk, and that most of its teachers and franchisees are parents who first came to Turtle Tots lessons with their own children.

Classes, pools and franchises.

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 turtle, a network and a shelf of awards.

The network today is described on the company’s own pages. It says Turtle Tots has 50 franchisees in the UK and a master franchisee in Ireland, teaching more than 14,000 babies, toddlers and preschoolers a week, and that it is looking for international master franchisees. Its website also carries country sections for Canada and the United Arab Emirates, and its Canadian page says the programme launched in the UK in 2011.

The company keeps a long list of awards. It says it was named Franchisor of the Year by the Approved Franchise Association in 2019 and again in 2020, and its 2019 announcement, which quoted Caroline Sparks as co-founder, gave the network then as more than 50 franchisees teaching over 13,000 babies and toddlers a week. Its awards page also lists Small Business of the Year at the Business Leader Awards in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2023, a bronze Stevie Award for Women in Business in 2022, and a 2019 gold award from Mom’s Choice.

The brand leans on its namesake animal. The company has introduced a turtle mascot and invited families to suggest a name for it, with a shortlist of five put to a customer vote, and the announcement speaks of “Turtle” and its sea-creature friends. Its UK website is organised around a lesson finder, regional location pages, franchise opportunity pages for individual towns and a customer portal, and it has offered free trial lessons through partners such as Electric Ireland.

For a design guide, Turtle Tots shows how one well-chosen animal can carry a name, a programme family and a mascot at once, from Turtle Tums to the turtle itself. Compare Water Babies, the baby swim school founded in 2002, and Monkey Music, another UK class franchise for young children. For this guide we use a shell green and a sunny sand with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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