One year on - and we’re just getting started

Exactly one year ago today, the Book Hero website went live, and a hopeful but fragile idea transformed into a fully functional business with real people, real shelves, real books and real customers.

There’s so much to be proud of as we celebrate our first birthday, but without doubt what we’re most proud of is the number of Kiwi readers we’ve been able to reach in such a short time. Book Hero now has over 30,000 amazing customers and has delivered over 50,000 orders - servicing Kiwis up and down the country, many of whom don’t have access to a local bookshop of their own. If you’re one of those customers and you’re reading this - thank you.

Feeling like we truly matter to our customers, and so quickly, brings a real sense of pride and purpose to what we do. We love coming to work - we’re happy to be of service, we’re proud of the books we sell, and we are grateful to be able to build our lives around doing something we love.

“I ordered a specific book on the last Friday of the school holidays for a Novel Study with my primary school class. It arrived to my school in Mangawhai early the following Monday morning! Amazing service! Thank you Book Hero.”

“I was looking for three novels and they were not available anywhere in my town.  They didn't even have them at three local libraries.  Book Hero has exactly what I needed and at a better price than their competitors.  The books arrived quickly and were exactly what I wanted.  Book Hero's is a great website to order your books.”

“Such LOVELY customer service. I hurried over to pick up the book I bought and didn't even see that I needed to wait for an email to pick up, but they fetched the book no hassles at all, even had a great local coffee recommendation wow”

“Simply wonderful. Thank you so much for a wonderful well packed purchase, so promptly delivered . These totally delightful Books I received, are part of the Christmas Charity Box I make up for our local Woman's Refuge Centre each year, as every child needs to have a special book that belongs to them. I will buy from this company again 100000% for sure.”

Given that just 9 months into our 3 year lease we moved into a larger warehouse, it’s fair to say that our growth has exceeded expectations. It’s hard to say what’s driven the growth exactly, but it turns out that yes, people do in fact still read physical books, and fast reliable delivery is still desirable in today’s world filled with marketplaces and drop shipping from overseas. Book Hero’s focus has been on expanding our in-stock range so that we can provide a high level of service that local customers can trust.

Getting to this point hasn’t been without its challenges. Navigating the supply chain and keeping books in-stock, when most of them (even the NZ published titles!) are located in Australia - hasn’t always been easy. Working with “off the shelf” software that’s not designed for a long-tail category like books has been a nightmare, and tested our patience. Chasing growth whilst at the same time being on a tight budget has led to stress that any small business owner would be familiar with. Ensuring we hire the right people, quickly, whilst at the same time not letting a single customer order slip through the cracks - has put pressure on everyone in the team. 

Every month for the past 12 months, we’ve arrived to HQ with more work to do than the previous month - a nice problem to have. More books to receive, more orders to ship, more problems to solve, more questions to answer - and we love it. Thank you! We can’t wait to get to work and we leave on Friday evening with a feeling of satisfaction that time at work was well always spent. At Book Hero, nothing is the same week to week, month to month - and we look forward to the future with a sense of confidence and adventure.

The growth of our store has also afforded us the opportunity to up-skill and grow our individual team members - which has been a rewarding experience in itself. There is a huge difference in skills and coordination required to service 50 orders a day, and 500 orders a day. We’ve grown the number of team members to support the growth, but we’ve also seen existing team members develop their skills and take on more responsibilities - which is awesome to see. It’s fun watching, young, hard-working people come out of their shells and appreciate how capable they are. By supporting Book Hero you’re also supporting the next generation of young people (our average age is just 25) who are innovating and changing the way Kiwis shop. 

We’re a forward-looking and optimistic team - so it’s only natural that we use our first birthday as an opportunity to look to the future. Enjoying Christmas (the happiest time of year!), reminding Kiwis that books are an affordable, healthy and life-changing gift, and being prepared operationally to meet the demand is absolutely our most urgent priority. Finishing the roll-out of our hand-built WMS and training a bunch of new team members to help over the Christmas period will be the keys to achieving this.

Beyond that, we see Year 2 as listening carefully to what our customers want to see from Book Hero. We see opportunity everywhere — opportunity to grow our range of in-stock books, to improve our service levels even further, to add more useful features to our website, to host more events in the physical world, and to offer customers other great products we know they’ll love.

We don’t know exactly what the future holds - but we can guarantee it will be nothing like our first year, and it’ll be a fun ride. Onwards and upwards! Thanks for being on the journey with us.