Our passion is to help the Bahá'í Community to grow in both size and unity. That is why Special Ideas distributes the worlds largest, most diverse line of teaching, proclamation and community development materials. We also believe that to succeed in this process, we must learn to work with like-minded organizations. That is why we have a sister company www.interfaithresources.com that helps make the Bahá'í principles accessible to everyone.

Special Ideas Inc. is essential a family business, started in 1981 by Justice St Rain, expanded dramatically when he married Karen, and finally incorporated in 2001. Karen is the CEO and oversees the web site and database, plus just about every other detail of running the business. Justice writes books, develops new products, screens submissions, produces the paper catalogs, and answers random questions. It is not unusual for you to hear our two younger children in the background when one of our very valued employees answers the phone to take your order.

Marcia has been with us since 2005 and will probably be the person you talk if on the phone. You couldn't ask for nicer people to work with.

After moving Special Ideas all over the country, we settled in Southern Indiana on a farm site in the thriving downtown metropolis of Heltonville, IN, population 350. We are about 45 minutes from Bloomington, IN, home to Indiana University as well as the largest Bahá'í community in the area. It's about two hours to Indianapolis to the north and Louisville to the south. We operate Special Ideas from a 4000 square foot barn built three years ago. From here we do product development, publishing and production, order management and our own order fulfillment.

In addition to searching the world for the most effective and inspiring products to make available to you, we also write, design and/or produce about half of the things we sell. That is one of the reasons we can keep our prices so low and our product diversity so wide. We are also happy to take suggestions or look at new product ideas you may have developed yourself. But please be patient. If they come in at a busy time it may take a long time to get back to you.

For many years, most of our sales have been generated by our paper catalog, but as times change, more and more of you are logging on right here to see what is new and place your orders. This web site undergoes radical changes almost constantly. We currently have forums for discussing Bahá'í issues, jokes and poetry, music sampling of most of our CD's and an archive of old articles written for our paper catalog. Please be patient with any down time, but also feel free to let us know about broken links, poor descriptions, missing products, etc.

Another trend is that the Community is becoming more centralized, and therefore there are more large Bahá'í Centers with bookstores. Consequently, we are beginning to offer slightly better terms for very large purchasers. Call us for details.

If you really like what you see here and would like to see more of it in person, we are available to provide bookstores at major conferences and summer schools. Justice is also available as a speaker on topics related to his many books and pamphlets. You are also welcome to visit us in southern Indiana if you come our way.

Justice and Karen