Source : THE AGE NEWS
On a flight from his former home in the United Kingdom to Australia, Nick Croydon sparked up a conversation with a young miner sitting beside him. He told his new travel companion that he was about to buy a chain of Australian book retailers. The miner’s response didn’t exactly court confidence.
“You’re screwed,” he said. “Mate, you’ve got no chance. You know no one reads any more?”
QBD Books boss Nick Croydon says the chain is working towards opening 100 stores in Australia.
He spent the rest of the flight nursing his whiskey, pondering the perfect stranger’s judgement of his business proposition.
Thirty thousand feet below, bookstores were shutting their doors. Kindles and Kobos were powering up.
But 10 years later, Croydon, now CEO and co-owner of QBD Books, has proven his one-time detractor – and countless other silent critics – wrong, as the company charts a course to opening its 100th store, bucking the trend of shrinking chains across the country.
The outlook for the broader industry is more grim – 3.7 per cent of bookstores have shut over the past five years, and a further 1.2 per cent are expected to close by 2030, according to data from IBISWorld. Yet QBD currently has 91 stores – all profitable – and is on track to open between three and five more a year.
QBD’s resilience is, according to Croydon, a result of an embrace of Australia’s “shopping centre mentality”. Every QBD store, including those in the pipeline, is inside a shopping centre – a choice designed to leverage relatively high footfall and allow the company to focus on “range and value” rather than getting customers in the door.
“It’s very rare for people to wake up in the morning and go, ‘oh, I must go and buy a book today’,” said Croydon. “It’s an impulse as they’re walking by, on their way to doing something else.
“[Being] in a shopping centre, I think, gives us an opportunity for [customers] to come and spend 10 minutes with us, and then, if you deliver a great experience, get them to come back,” said Croydon, who is also the author of children’s book series The Hyde Park Squirrels, and the coming spy thriller The Turing Protocol.
The other great boon for the business has been the rise in the romantasy genre, a combination of romance and fantasy that has exploded in popularity thanks to social media influencers and the success of the wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses and Empyrean series. The author of the former, Sarah J. Maas, has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.
“It’s been going on for a good 18 months now, but it’s strong and a lot of my team members love it,” said Croydon. “You go into that section, it will be perfectly merchandised because they love that section.”
The genre makes up 12 per cent of sales in the industry; at QBD, it’s more than 20 per cent. Croydon said the love for the genre was so strong that QBD customers were buying duplicates of their favourite books – one to read, and one to display.
“It’s almost like a collectible, which is great news for brick-and-mortar retailers like me,” said Croydon. “The public are investing, still, in paper, which is great to see.”
Women in their early 20s represent one of QBD’s biggest customer bases, many of whom have flocked to the new genre. The other key groups are young mothers and middle-aged men.
“Persistent competition” is the biggest pressure point on book retailers such as Dymocks and QBD.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Prices at QBD are generally lower than other book retailers such as Dymocks and Harry Hartog, but Croydon steers clear of the “discount store” label, as he wants the brand to be defined by the customer experience.
“It’s not about the price. We make our pricing decisions, and our decision is to be competitive,” says Croydon. “We want to surprise our customers … they come into a store like ours when they’re expecting to get a decent price, but then they get the same if not better service than they would in a high-end store.”
According to IBISWorld, the biggest pressure point on book retailers such as QBD and Dymocks is “persistent competition from external retailers, including discount department stores and online-only platforms,” which limits the market share brick-and-mortar chains can maintain by selling books at wholesale price.
To maintain QBD’s market position, the company has rolled out new training programs for staff in an attempt to encourage conversation and recommendations from booksellers to customers.
They’ve also recently invested in a customer tracking system through Kepler Analytics — which anonymously tracks customers’ mobile phones to provide data on how many visitors are purchasing and time spent in store.
QBD was awarded book retailer of the year at this year’s Australian Book Industry Awards.
