Our origin story

Susie Maguire is the creator of The Poop Museum and loves few things more than sharing her love of, and fascination with poop! But how did this all happen?

Susie had three baby brothers before her 5th birthday, so she had a lot of early exposure to poop and poop shenanigans! And of course, poop wasn’t just ever present, it was also the source of much hilarity!

Susie began her career as an educator as a child, when from the age of 8, she forced her three little brothers to be her students. In her early teens she fell in love with running, became an athlete, and was soon coaching younger kids, and working as a sports councillor at summer camps.

She was also a serial entrepreneur from a young age - cutting grass, raking leaves and shoveling snow, alongside selling lemonade, delivering newspapers for The Pittsburgh Press and even babysitting!

That entrepreneurial spirit continued into her twenties and thirties and Susie built multiple small business’. She also began to travel the world in search of adventure, and met a defining character in her poop journey while traveling in the bush in Zimbabwe. One night, while sleeping on the roof of a boat on Lake Kariba, Susie was woken by what sounded like a chainsaw. Looking over the side of the boat, she discovered it was actually a pooping hippopotamus! It was love (and laughter and fascination) at first sight! Curiosity peaked, she began learning about poop and poopers as something of a hobby.

Her career was focused on learning and development, and in her early 30s she built a niche management consultancy, that saw her and her team traveling the world and delivering global L&D, OD and Organizational Change programs for clients that included PepsiCo, Unilever, Facebook and many more.

Susie had been told she would never be able to have children when she was just 24, so when she miraculously became a mom at 39, she was beyond thrilled and it changed her focus entirely. She decided to raise her son without school, and her work shifted to focus on children. She created programs and events for children of all ages, working with home school groups, schools, nurseries, libraries and organizations like The Institute of Imagination in London (UK). Together with her son, they adventured around the world, visiting more than 60 countries and calling 5 of them home, while always meeting and working with children wherever they went.

In 2019, they decided to make The Netherlands home, just in time for the arrival of Covid, and so Susie took all of her work online starting in July 2020. In October 2020, the idea for The Poop Museum plopped right into Susie’s head, and utterly enchanted and delighted with the idea, she launched the program the same day. She hoped to have 180 children visit The Poop Museum between October and Christmas, but demand was immediate and immense and in the end, 10x as many children visited The Poop Museum in those few weeks. Something very fabulous had been born, and the world it seemed, shared Susie’s sense of fun and fascination with all things fecal.

After nearly 3000 online programs, Susie desperately needed to escape her basement studio and return to the real world, so … she picked up the phone and started to call Children’s Librarians to ask if they would like a visit from The Poop Museum. The response was incredible, and in the next few years 260+ libraries would host more than 350 of Susie’s programs, many booking her (and her other programs) again and again.

The Poop Museum Part 2, and Part 3 were transformed from online to in-person programs and Night at The Poop Museum was born. Multiple Gross, Weird, Cool Science programs that had been created in the online world, also found an audience in the real world, and in 2025, Susie created an entirely new program (which delights her no end!) called Their BUTT does WHAT?!?!? which brought even more hilarity, and some very super cool butt science into the world! For example, did you know that praying mantis’ have 3D printer butts? Some ants can shoot acid out of their butts? And that dragon fly larvae and sea cucumbers all breathe through their butts?!

Oh the things that you can learn at these programs!!

The next evolution of The Poop Museum has arrived with Poop Camps for summer 2026, Build Your Own Poop Museum kits available, the introduction of a new program for teens and adults called Guts of Glory, partnerships to produce Science Saturdays and at looooong last … a YouTube channel …. woohoo! … so that millions more children and their adults can watch and laugh and learn about the wonderful world of poop and pooping!

There’s more amazing things planned for the future too, so do sign up for our newsletter and come along for the adventure!

P.S. Susie also did a TedX talk back in 2018, and if you’re interested to learn more about her and the “What if Wonderful” philosophy that she lives by check it out here.