If you’re about to become a parent, you’ll soon understand why people say, “The days are long, but the years are short”. It’s something we hear but don’t fully understand until we become parents ourselves and realise just how quickly everything seems to change.
One day we’re holding a newborn who barely fits in our arms, and before we’ve had time to process it, they’re running ahead of us, forming their own opinions, creating their own language and building their own little world.
Suddenly, we’re looking at photos from a few months ago, a few years ago or sometimes even just last week, and we pause for a little longer than we expected. Tiny feet. Sleepy faces. First smiles. Messy meals. Holidays that felt chaotic at the time but somehow feel perfect in hindsight.
Looking back at those moments, we realise our lives are full of stories and that each and every one of us is a storyteller. If you think about it, we’ve been telling and making up stories since we were children ourselves, using our imagination and retelling the ones worth sharing and keeping. Then we become parents and start creating even bigger stories. A simple bedtime routine can turn into an elaborate nightly adventure.
That’s where the idea behind Bandigon began for us.
We are Alba and Camilo, founders of Bandigon. Like many parents, our evenings often ended the same way: reading with our boys or making up stories together. Sometimes those stories were completely imagined. Other times, they were inspired by real moments from our lives.
And then something clicked.
We realised our kids loved the stories we made up, even more so when they were in them. They didn’t just want to hear the adventure, they wanted to be part of it. So we created Bandigon, a place where anyone can turn their own stories and memories into personalised illustrated books, with the people they love becoming beautifully illustrated characters from the photos they upload.
