LadBaby — The Dyslexic Couple Behind Five Christmas Number Ones
You are sitting at the kitchen table with your child, trying to read a bedtime story. The words are there on the page, but they arrive slowly, each one requiring a small act of construction that the other parents at school pickup do not seem to need. You wonder whether your child has inherited the same difficulty. You wonder whether anyone will notice. You wonder whether it matters.
Now imagine that you and your partner both carry the same processing difference. You both grew up decoding text with more effort than your classmates. You both had mothers who sat with you for hours after school, working through reading and writing exercises because the classroom alone was not enough. And now, together, you have built one of the most recognisable family brands in the United Kingdom — five consecutive Christmas number one singles, a bestselling children's book series, a Sunday Times bestselling autobiography, and a content empire reaching over thirteen million people worldwide.
This is Mark and Roxanne Hoyle, known to most of the internet as LadBaby. Both dyslexic. Both diagnosed in childhood. Both proof that a cognitive profile built around visual processing rather than text decoding is not a limitation on what you can build — it is a blueprint for how you build it.
Does LadBaby actually have dyslexia
Yes. Both Mark and Roxanne Hoyle have confirmed their dyslexia publicly and repeatedly — on ITV's Lorraine, in interviews with ITV News Central, on social media, and throughout their 2024 autobiography Our LadBaby Journey.
Mark was diagnosed privately as a child. His mother paid for the assessment because, as he has explained, dyslexia "was still a bit off the radar" in schools at that time. He attended Greythorn Primary School in Nottingham, where the school offered additional teaching, extra classes, and support with exams once the diagnosis was in place. Mark turned all of it down. He was afraid of being bullied.
That decision — refusing help to avoid standing out — is one of the most consistent patterns in the dyslexia literature. Research by the British Dyslexia Association has documented that children with dyslexia frequently reject accommodations not because the support is unhelpful, but because the social cost of being visibly different exceeds the academic benefit of being quietly supported. The stigma does more damage than the difficulty.
Roxanne's story follows a parallel track. Her school did not identify the dyslexia at all. Her mother, sensing something was wrong, arranged a private diagnosis when Roxanne was around seven or eight years old. Like Mark, Roxanne credits her mother's intervention as the turning point — not because the diagnosis fixed anything, but because it replaced confusion with understanding.
Both Mark and Roxanne have spoken about the hours their mothers spent with them at home, working through reading and writing exercises that the classroom could not provide at the pace or in the format their minds needed. They describe themselves as "really lucky" to have had that support. The word is carefully chosen. They know that not every child with dyslexia has a parent who can afford a private diagnosis or carve out hours for one-on-one instruction.
How a graphic designer's visual mind became a content empire
Before LadBaby existed, Mark Hoyle was a graphic designer. He studied design at university, then worked at agencies in London and Nottingham, including a stint at Wunderman, one of the world's largest digital agencies. His professional life was built entirely around visual communication — layout, colour, spatial composition, the translation of ideas into images.
This is not a coincidence. Research on dyslexia and career selection has consistently found that dyslexic adults are overrepresented in visually oriented professions. A study published by researchers at the Royal College of Art found that dyslexic design students showed enhanced abilities in holistic visual processing — the capacity to take in an entire visual field at once rather than processing it element by element. Sally Shaywitz's "Sea of Strengths" model at Yale describes this pattern directly: a specific weakness in phonemic decoding surrounded by intact or heightened abilities in other cognitive domains, particularly visual-spatial reasoning.
Mark's career in graphic design was his visual processing dimension running at full speed. The reading difficulty was still there. But design does not route through the phonemic system the way reading does. It routes through spatial awareness, colour perception, compositional logic — the channels where his mind operated without friction.
In 2016, while Roxanne was pregnant with their first son, Phoenix, Mark started a blog. The name was simple: LadBaby. He was a lad, and he was having a baby. The blog became a YouTube channel. The videos were what you would expect from a designer who thinks in pictures — visually driven, tightly framed, short, and built around showing rather than telling.
In June 2017, one video changed everything. Mark bought a four-pound toolbox from a hardware store and converted it into a lunchbox for his son. The video went viral. Millions of views. The subscriber count crossed one million. And Mark Hoyle, the dyslexic graphic designer from Nottingham, became LadBaby.
The sausage roll that broke the Beatles' record
What happened next is one of the most improbable stories in modern British music.
In 2018, Mark and Roxanne recorded a sausage-roll-themed parody of Starship's "We Built This City." The single, with all profits going to the Trussell Trust — the UK's largest food bank network — reached Christmas number one. It was funny, it was absurd, and it raised real money for families who could not afford to eat.
They did it again in 2019 with "I Love Sausage Rolls." And again in 2020 with "Don't Stop Me Eatin'." And again in 2021 with "Sausage Rolls For Everyone," this time featuring Ed Sheeran and Elton John. And again in 2022 with "Food Aid," a reworking of Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" with money expert Martin Lewis.
Five consecutive UK Christmas number one singles. No act in history had achieved that — not the Beatles, not the Spice Girls, not Cliff Richard. LadBaby holds the record alone.
The Trussell Trust received over three hundred thousand pounds in direct donations from the singles. But the real impact was visibility. Every December, for five years running, the UK's most high-profile chart battle centred on a couple from Nottingham raising money for food banks. The conversation about food poverty reached audiences that charity campaigns alone never could.
Here is the part that connects to the dyslexia story. Mark and Roxanne did not write these songs in the traditional sense. They did not sit in a studio with sheet music and lyric drafts. They took existing, well-known melodies — songs the audience already carried in their heads — and rewrote them around a single visual image: a sausage roll. The creative method is classic visual and narrative processing. Start with a picture. Build outward from there. Let the image do the work that text alone makes difficult.
How two dyslexic parents became bestselling children's authors
In 2021, Mark and Roxanne returned to Greythorn Primary — Mark's old school in Nottingham — to celebrate the launch of their first children's book: Greg the Sausage Roll: Santa's Little Helper. The visit was emotional. Mark stood in front of the same classrooms where he had once been afraid to accept help for his dyslexia, and talked to children about the importance of reading.
The book — published by Puffin, part of Penguin Random House — became a Sunday Times bestseller. It sold over 119,000 hardback copies in under two months and was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Through a partnership with the National Literacy Trust and W. H. Smith, the Hoyles donated over 28,000 books to children who did not have one at home.
The irony is not lost on them. Two dyslexic adults who grew up struggling with text have become some of the UK's most successful children's authors. The Greg the Sausage Roll series now runs to eight titles, with a World Book Day exclusive in 2024 that spent four weeks at the top of the UK book charts. Their autobiography, Our LadBaby Journey, hit the Sunday Times bestseller list on publication in November 2024.
Mark has been direct about how dyslexia shaped the writing process. Speaking to ITV News Central at Greythorn Primary, he described dyslexia as a "terrible thing" — then added the qualifier that reframes the entire experience:
"It's a terrible thing until you work out how to unlock the part of your brain that does the translating from words to pictures."
That sentence describes a cognitive adaptation. The "translating from words to pictures" is not a metaphor. It is a processing strategy — a way of routing information through the visual system when the phonemic system imposes too much friction. And the children's books themselves reflect that strategy. The Greg the Sausage Roll series is heavily illustrated, visually driven, and designed so that the pictures carry as much narrative weight as the text. They are books built by visual thinkers, for visual thinkers.
Roxanne's perspective adds another layer. In an interview with Mother and Baby, she described her own relationship with text:
"Words just jumble for me. But it's also my superpower. I've learned to be more creative in teaching my kids."
She learned her times tables by jumping on a trampoline. Not from a textbook. Not from flashcards. From a full-body, multi-sensory experience that encoded the information through rhythm and movement rather than through visual symbols on a page. Now she applies the same principle to her own children — using educational apps, physical play, and creative methods that route around the text bottleneck rather than forcing through it.
The cognitive dimensions behind LadBaby's success
Three of CognitionType's seven cognitive dimensions explain the Hoyle pattern with particular clarity.
Visual processing is the dimension that made Mark a graphic designer before it made him a content creator. His professional training was in translating ideas into images — spatial composition, visual hierarchy, the logic of how a viewer's eye moves across a frame. When he started making YouTube videos, that training transferred directly. LadBaby's content is visual-first. The toolbox-to-lunchbox video that launched the channel is a sight gag. The sausage roll songs are built around a visual icon. The children's books are structured so the illustrations carry the story. Every channel Mark and Roxanne have built routes through the visual processing system rather than the phonemic one.
Research by Guinevere Eden at Georgetown University has documented that many individuals with dyslexia develop compensatory strengths in visual-spatial processing. Von Karolyi and colleagues published findings in Brain and Language in 2003 showing that dyslexic participants outperformed non-dyslexic participants on tasks requiring global visual-spatial processing — the ability to take in an entire scene at once rather than decomposing it into parts. Mark's design career and content empire are both expressions of that same cognitive architecture: a mind that sees wholes before it sees parts, pictures before it sees words.
Phonemic processing is where the difficulty sits for both Mark and Roxanne. The system that converts written symbols into sound-based representations operates with more effort than it does in non-dyslexic readers. This is the bottleneck that made school painful, that Mark hid from his classmates, that Roxanne's mother identified before the school did. It is specific and measurable. It does not affect intelligence, creativity, or the ability to build a business. It affects the speed and ease with which text is decoded — one point in the processing chain, surrounded by everything else that works without friction.
The fact that both partners share the same phonemic processing profile is worth noting. They understand each other's experience without explanation. When Mark describes "translating from words to pictures," Roxanne does not need that translated — she already lives in the same cognitive architecture. Their collaboration works in part because neither partner carries the burden of being the only divergent thinker in the relationship. They build from the same processing baseline.
Expression and output is the third dimension — the pathway from thought to language. Mark and Roxanne found their output channels in video, music, and visual storytelling rather than in traditional written formats. This is the pattern that Julie Logan's research at Bayes Business School documented in dyslexic entrepreneurs: when text-based communication imposes friction, dyslexic thinkers develop alternative output strategies — oral communication, visual presentation, delegation of writing tasks, narrative rather than analytical framing. The Hoyles did not write a business plan and then build LadBaby. They made a funny video, watched it spread, and followed the energy. The expression came through the camera, not the page.
What this means if you recognise the pattern
If the Hoyles' experience resonates — the words that jumble, the reading that costs more effort than it seems to cost everyone else, the fear of standing out if you accept help, the mother who sat with you after school because the classroom alone was not enough — that resonance is worth following.
Mark's story contains a detail that research on dyslexia intervention finds consistently: he refused the support his school offered because he was afraid of being bullied. The accommodations were available. The system, imperfectly, had identified the need. But the social cost of being different overwhelmed the academic benefit of being supported. That gap — between available help and accepted help — is where many dyslexic children lose years.
Roxanne's story contains the other common gap: her school did not identify the dyslexia at all. Her mother did. Without a parent with the resources and awareness to seek a private diagnosis, Roxanne's processing difference would have remained unnamed throughout her education. The signs of dyslexia were there. The system missed them.
CognitionType measures seven dimensions of cognitive processing, including visual processing, phonemic processing, and expression and output. It maps the full shape of how your mind works — where the reading bottleneck sits, where the visual strengths run, and where your natural output channels are — so you can build around your architecture deliberately rather than discovering it by accident. Mark spent years as a graphic designer before realising that visual communication was not just a career preference but a cognitive necessity. Roxanne spent years believing words should not jumble before understanding that her mind was routing information through a different channel. The earlier you see the full profile, the less time you spend forcing yourself through the wrong medium.
The Hoyles built a content empire, a bestselling book series, and a record-breaking music career by working with their cognitive architecture rather than against it. They did not overcome dyslexia. They found the channels — visual, musical, physical — where their minds could operate at full speed. The classroom called that a difficulty. The internet called it LadBaby.
CognitionType is an informational assessment, not a clinical diagnosis. If you suspect dyslexia or another learning difference, we encourage you to seek formal evaluation from a qualified professional. A cognitive profile is a complement to clinical assessment, not a replacement.