Next Saturday, New Zealand celebrates Bookshop Day - a day to celebrate the special place bookshops hold in the hearts of readers and communities across the country.
Book Hero has never set out to be a bookstore like any other.
From the beginning, we deliberately tore up the rulebook of what we thought a bookstore had to look like and started building one for the way we believe a growing number of New Zealanders want to discover, buy and enjoy books.
We love the neighbourhood bookshop. Communities across New Zealand are wonderfully served by passionate independent booksellers who know their customers, champion authors and create places where readers can come together.
We also believe there is room for a different kind of bookseller.
Book Hero is online-first. At the heart of our business is our Auckland warehouse, which currently holds more than 100,000 books, with many more arriving ahead of Christmas. That's vastly more than we could ever fit inside a typical high street bookstore.
Why does that matter?
Because New Zealand is a small country at the bottom of the world, and readers here deserve access to an extraordinary range of books without necessarily having to order them from overseas or wait weeks for them to arrive.
Holding those books here means someone in Auckland, Invercargill, Gisborne, Nelson or a small rural community can discover a book today and have it on their doorstep tomorrow - sent from a New Zealand-owned bookstore by a team of people right here in New Zealand.
It also means we're investing in the local book industry - stocking books from New Zealand authors and publishers alongside hundreds of thousands of titles from around the world, and helping make them discoverable and available to readers throughout the country.
And while we're online-first, we're very much a physical business.
Book Hero is less than two years old, but we already employ 20 full-time team members, alongside another 5 who work with us while studying or pursuing other interests. We're proudly based in Hobsonville, Auckland, where some of our team have moved closer to work, rented homes, joined gyms, become regulars at local cafés and made this community their home.
We know our local courier drivers. We support local schools and literacy events. Our customers pop into the bookstore with their children, their friends and sometimes just to tell us what they've been reading.
And from here in Hobsonville, that community now stretches across New Zealand.
At a time when so much of the conversation is about AI, screen time and doomscrolling, we're seeing another story unfold. People are still reading. A lot.
Every day, we sell between 1,000 and 2,000 books. And one of my favourite things about that number is that so many of them aren't the books dominating bestseller lists or social media. They're backlist titles, obscure titles and books we've sometimes ordered in such surprising quantities that an account manager has asked us, "Are you sure these are ours?"
The world's library is enormous - and our curiosity might be even bigger.
There is something wonderfully enduring about a physical book. It lives in your home and on your shelves. It can say something about who you are, what you're interested in and what you believe. It can be admired, scribbled in, lent to a friend, passed down to a child or given away to someone who needs it more than you do.
And perhaps best of all, books create one of my favourite questions: "Have you read this? What did you think?"
That shared experience - and everything that can flow from it - will always have value.
I'm incredibly proud of what our team has built. In less than two years, Book Hero has grown from zero customers to more than 120,000. Our warehouse is full of books, our Hobsonville bookstore is full of readers, and every day thousands more books leave our building on their way to homes around New Zealand.
None of that happens without people.
Our team doesn't look like a stereotypical bookstore team either. Yes, we have people who seem to have read almost every book ever written and can recommend your next favourite in about 30 seconds.
But we also have people who are brilliant at keeping 100,000 books organised. People who can pick and pack at lightning speed so an order can reach the other end of the country overnight. People with the patience and empathy to help when something goes wrong. People who write and create. People who work with data, solve problems, build systems, fix things and write code. We believe all of those people - and all of those skills - are part of what it takes to build a bookstore that can be loved and enjoyed in a fast-changing world.
We're proud of our warehouse. We're proud of our Hobsonville bookstore. We're proud of our customers, our authors, our publishers and partners who take risks every day to bring new stories into the world.
But most of all, I'm proud of our Book Hero team, who built all of this from nothing.
Bookshop Day is next Saturday, 10 October, and our doors at 112B Hobsonville Road will be open. We'll have some special things happening for the kids, plenty of books to discover, and we'd genuinely love to meet you.
Below are some of the people who make Book Hero possible.
Thank you, as always, for supporting our 100% New Zealand-owned bookstore - and for helping us prove that books and reading are alive and well in Aotearoa.
