Six Red Marbles Celebrates 25 Years of Edtech Leadership

The Marbles Start Rolling

Twenty-five years ago, the six original Marbles started Six Red Marbles, “a high-caliber full-service development team providing content, design, programming, production, and testing services.” Today, we number more than 200 Marbles, with hundreds more supporting us on a daily basis in numerous subject areas. While the industry, technology, and people have changed over the years, our focus on education and our commitment to providing high-quality content and service have not.

Early work involved developing multimedia materials for the major educational publishers that remain strong partners to this day. It was an exciting time; students increasingly had access to computers at school or at home, and access to the Internet was growing thanks to ISPs such as AOL and CompuServe. Education technology was teeming with possibilities, and Six Red Marbles was right at the forefront of innovation.

The Marbles Meet Monotype

Then, in 2008, Six Red Marbles was acquired by a private equity firm and merged with Monotype, LLC, based in Baltimore. Monotype was established in 1920 and began as a typesetting company specializing in print content development, design, and production (done by hand until the late 1980s) for college and medical textbooks before shifting its focus to preK–12. This combination of two great companies gave us the capacity to efficiently deliver print and digital products throughout the entire development cycle.

We still have one of Monotype’s original monotype machines in our Boston office!

Our next expansion came in 2011 when we acquired Brown Publishing, making us the largest U.S. development house dedicated exclusively to the educational publishing industry.

International Marbles

We became an international company in 2012, when we opened an office in Delhi, and we expanded to Chennai in 2019. Over time, we expanded our customer base from publishing and preK–12 to include higher education and adult learning clients.

In 2016, Six Red Marbles joined the Jouve family of companies to support their shared mission of delivering content and learning innovation through comprehensive platforms and managed services around the world.

In the years since joining Jouve, SRM has enjoyed year-over-year growth and has been making new inroads into the education space, primarily in higher education and adult learning.

Year of Disruption

The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 disrupted schools across the country and forced a pivot to online learning. In response, we launched Faculty Success, a series of well-organized and practical professional development modules to help faculty transition to teaching online. During a time of uncertainty and anxiety, being able to focus our expertise and make a difference for faculty around the world reminded us why we love doing what we do.

With our higher ed client list growing, it was time to invest in more talent. In September 2020, after working closely with Susan Simpfenderfer and her team for years, SRM acquired Triple SSS Press Media Development and its bench of higher ed experts. “Triple SSS enjoyed its niche higher education talents, largely in many skills areas, but lacked a more complex delivery system. Partnering with Six Red Marbles has enhanced and complemented both of our outreaches to the educational communities,” says Susan.

Rolling into the Future

We have many exciting new projects in development, and throughout this 25th anniversary year, we will be highlighting the different teams that come together to make us Six Red Marbles. Our people are our greatest strength, and our clients give us the opportunity to achieve our mission and vision of creating innovative learning experience that teach, inspire, and prepare generations of lifelong learners. We have had a great 25 years, and we can’t wait to see what the next 25 will bring.