Growing Pains

I’m delighted to report that things are not slowing down at Book Hero. We delivered more books to customers in May than we did over the busy Christmas period in December, and June is on-track to be busier still. We’re grateful and encouraged by the support and extend our sincere thanks to every customer for shopping with us and for helping spread the word with reviews and referrals — we couldn’t have arrived at this point without you. We are having lots of fun as a team, and we love seeing your orders roll in and the amazing books you’re reading!

Book Hero operates in a highly competitive market, and despite some promising early signs, we know there is a lot of work left to do to establish ourselves for the long-term. We started in October with 10,000 books in-stock and that number has grown to over 30,000. The growth in our range has meant more customers are finding the book they want to read — but with millions of titles available, we’re frustrated every day when we don’t have a particular book that a customer is looking for. We love books, but we also love providing a fast delivery service — and waiting weeks for restocks and special order books to arrive doesn’t make us particularly proud or happy.

Our cosy 160m2 warehouse is overflowing with books, and it’s getting hard to move around — a good problem to have.

Tim has been ordering up a storm to grow our range and reduce the chances of our best-sellers going out of stock. Our shelves are absolutely packed — which is cool to see, but makes picking and put-away slower and less efficient. We’re now using the tops of our bookshelves, our consumables (e.g. boxes and packaging materials) are now stored in bulk at an off-site location to free up space, and the team has even given up a chunk of our already humble lunchroom to extra bookshelves and storage.

Al made an emergency trip to Bunnings on Friday to squeeze every last m2 out of our warehouse — goodbye lunchroom!

All this to say — we worked hard to get this first warehouse humming, but if we want to continue to increase the number of books available to New Zealanders, we may need to find a bigger warehouse to call home. Starting a new business in an economic downturn is both scary and risky — but taking this next step feels even more scary. Tim often says we’ve jumped off a cliff and we’re building the plane on the way down — he’s not wrong! It’s the positive and supportive messages from customers (we now have over 1,000 5 star reviews on Google) that fuel me and keep me going — plus the team that we’re building here at Book Hero that is growing stronger and more capable every day.

We celebrated with cake when we achieve 1,000 5 star reviews on Google — thanks for your support!

Which leads me to some exciting team updates! Since our last Journal Entry I’m thrilled to announce that the magnificent Marnie has joined our team and is already up to speed receiving and shelving the avalanche of new books and helping our customers over email and at the Pick Ups desk. Marnie commented to me just yesterday she has no idea how we managed to get through all this work as a smaller team without her — and frankly I have no idea either, so thank you for saving us Marnie! All the wonderful feedback we receive from customers about Marnie’s service makes me feel our customers are just as happy to have Marnie on the team as we are.

I’m also excited (and relieved?) to report that our great friend Alastair has joined the team full-time, as we seek to continue to scale up our operations with more books in the lead-up to Christmas. We love having Al in the office — not just for the great coffee and homemade cookies, but for his positive and optimistic attitude coupled with a uniquely analytical mind. We were already a pretty quirky bunch of booksellers and with Al (and Evie) on the team that’s all set to continue 😛

Evie sur-pur-vising Nicola (l), the magnificent Marnie (m), and Alastair (r)

When we started Book Hero — it felt like everything was on either Tim’s shoulders or my shoulders — because it was. And that’s the way it should be when you start a small business. But as we’ve grown and the team has grown with it — it’s been wonderful for me personally to be able to spread that load — and I know Tim feels the same. I am so grateful for the efforts of the whole team receiving books, shipping books, helping customers solve problems, sending emails and creating social content spreading the word about new books on the shelves. Large chunks of this now happen without me which allows me to keep my eyes looking forward to the exciting road ahead of us.

We dream of a bigger warehouse — with your continued support, we hope to make it happen

It’s hard to believe Book Hero is still three months away from its first birthday, but as we approach that important anniversary and we finalise our plans on how we’re going to survive this Christmas, I’d like to take a moment to thank our team and our customers for giving us the opportunity we see before us. We come to work every day with a lot of problems to solve (where are all these books going???) — but they’re largely of our own making — and they’re good problems. We are lucky to have the support of everyone who chooses to buy books from Book Hero — you allow us to do what we love, and we’re grateful.

We will keep you updated on our plans to continue to grow our range as we seek to fulfil our mission of building the best online bookstore for New Zealanders. Onwards!