Rainbow Caterpillar

Happie Testa is serious about books. When her daughter was a baby, Happie was eager to read to her. Buying baby books in English was easy; finding them in her native Italian, or her husband’s first language of Farsi, was an entirely different story.

“I started reading books to her before she was a year old,” says Happie, co-owner with Hanoosh Abbasi of Rainbow Caterpillar Multilingual Bookshop, located on Lauder Avenue in Toronto.

“I was looking for Italian baby books, but couldn’t find any,” she says. “I wanted my daughter to grow up with both languages, plus English and French.”

Happie discovered she was not alone. The people she spoke with told her it was difficult to purchase kids’ books in their native language. It was then that the seed of an idea was planted and Happie began to investigate to see if there was a market for multilingual children’s books. She conducted a formal, online survey and the results were so encouraging she joined forces with her friend Hanoosh, who had experience in business, and in 2010, they launched Rainbow Caterpillar Multilingual Bookshop online.