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In a strategic move to become more town than gown, Blackwell’s, as it celebrates its 140th anniversary, is looking to build its non-academic customer base in a bid to break into the black.
Blackwell’s has sold more trade books than academic in the past year, in a first for the retailer, and c.e.o. David Prescott (pictured below) is eager to broaden the firm’s offer both online and in store. Prescott said online sales have been "instrumental" in changing the perception of Blackwell’s as purely an academic retailer, but he stressed the firm would not move away from its heritage. In the year to end June 2018, Blackwell’s reported a 17% rise in sales (from £48.3m in 2017 to £57m) across high street and campus stores, with gross profit up to £13.3m (from £12.6m in the previous year’s results), and losses cut from £2.1m to £1m.
Prescott and outgoing sales and marketing director Dean Drew say the real growth in recent years has been in online business and sales of children’s titles (up 25% year on year, according to its 2018 accounts) as Blackwell’s broadens its offer, with shops such as its Westgate branch in Oxford pitched at families and children rather than students.
The firm’s booksellers are key not only to the physical shops, where up to 80% of buying is done locally, but also to the website, with former booksellers running the online shop. Both in store and online, Blackwell’s sells academic books, second-hand, trade, rare, antiquarian and music books as well as art and posters, gifts, cards, stationery and games. "We are reaching a much broader customer base for the first time," Prescott said. "It was a conscious effort. The business itself played in a very small part of the market outside Oxford and Cambridge, but academic shops were just academic shops, so therefore both broadening the offer and targeting new customers is bearing fruit. The growth isn’t because we’re moving away from our academic heritage, but because we are focused on broadening our offer. That’s where we have been successful."
Drew added: "Our biggest growth area is children’s, which is affecting what we are trying to do. All the trade categories we are growing in—some, fair enough, from a very low base, but nevertheless they’re growing—and academic remains relatively strong. There’s also been some growth internationally [thanks to sales coming from] online. For the first time, Blackwell’s has sold more general books, more trade books, than academic."
Back in the black
With this year’s accounts due to be filed in October, Prescott said the first three financial quarters have been positive, with plans still in place for an employee ownership scheme—first raised in 2009 by president Toby Blackwell, the grandson of the chain’s founder Benjamin—once Blackwell’s returns to profit. But Prescott warned growth has slowed, after double-digit growth across the business in each of the past three years. He said: "It’s another step forward, as it stands, touch wood. The first three quarters have been good. Online sales continue to do very well; our flagship shops—shops such as Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh—are all doing well. It’s positive. It should be another big step forward, but we are not quite in the black.
"Employee ownership is absolutely still the endgame. We’re committed to that. Toby is committed to that. But the point is, we need to be profitable. It’s not like we put those conversations on the back burner, but there shouldn’t be any distraction for the business, first and foremost: let’s get ourselves to being profitable, and then we can talk about that. Across the entire business, we’ve done double-digit growth for the past three years. This year it won’t be as much as that, because of course it’s not exponential [growth] forever; part of the journey is that it starts to curve off. But it will still be good growth again this year."
This year the chain marks 140 years since Benjamin Henry Blackwell set up shop at 50 Broad Street in Oxford in 1879. The firm’s history spans two world wars, three monarchs and the Moon landings; meanwhile, Allen Lane is said to have had the idea for Penguin Books under an apple tree on the lawn at Benjamin’s son Sir Basil Blackwell’s home in 1934.
When Benjamin died in 1924, Basil took over the firm. By 1938, the flagship store, once just a 12 sq ft space, had expanded to take in 48, 49 and 51 Broad Street, with shelf space more than doubled. In 1956, Basil was knighted for his contributions to bookselling. The 1960s saw the construction of the legendary basement Norrington Room, which boasts two and a half miles of shelving, with some 160,000 volumes, and Blackwell’s opened its Art Bookshop on Broad Street.
Sir Basil’s son, Julian "Toby" Blackwell, took over the business in 1984 and in 1995 Blackwell’s became one of the first retailers to go online. By the late Nineties, Blackwell’s had acquired Heffers in Cambridge and Thin’s in Edinburgh, and today the chain now boasts 30 shops and more than 500 staff.
Its latest store opened in Belfast on Monday 8th April. It reflects Blackwell’s continued expansion into more mainstream locally curated bookselling. The University Road shop will support staff and students at Queen’s University Belfast, but it will also stock a range of trade books, Irish literature, stationery, gifts and board games.
A new start
Walking through the Broad Street shop on a Monday morning, tourists browse the selection of books from indie publishers out front, with booksellers helping customers in its busy kids’ department as students head down to the Norrington Room, where the bulk of the academic stock is. Prescott greets booksellers by name—many have worked in store for longer than his 24-year stint at the company, which started when he was a goods-in supervisor at the Nottingham Trent shop in 1995. That run pales in comparison to booksellers with 49-year careers on the shop floor—and it is this knowledge and expertise that Prescott has been eager to translate online.
"That’s the million-dollar question: how do you replicate Oxford Broad Street on the website? We’ve been using our booksellers a lot more on the website in the past few years, they are far more visible. It’s about trying to build a compelling offer for customers that is more [akin to] what they would expect from Blackwell’s: our expertise, our heritage and everything else, the skill of our booksellers. They also want to see that online." He adds: "In terms of trying to replicate that, it’s not easy, but that is definitively something we are trying to achieve. I mean, you’re not going to walk into Amazon’s headquarters and see Ray [Mattinson, senior bookseller at Broad Street]. We’re trying to bring that love of books to the website and showcase that, and the best way to do that is by using the booksellers."
As well as the website regularly relaying messages from booksellers on the shop floor about what is selling well, staff can also directly contact Prescott through a letters page: any employee can write to Prescott or senior management about an issue and expect an answer direct from the top. With the Waterstones “real living wage” campaign hitting headlines, Prescott remained tight- lipped on the pay issue, but he has sent a letter to staff, directly addressing it.
"That’s an internal dialogue we have had recently within our business, in terms of salaries and all the rest of it. These are not questions that we haven’t looked at before and had that internal dialogue with staff about, ‘This would cost x, this would cost y, this would mean this.’ We had one letter about the real living wage last week, asking for an update in light of the Waterstones story."
For now, the main challenge is getting back into the black. "The focus is laser-like on sustainable profitability," said Prescott. "It would be easy to get there in terms of slash and burn and get there for one year, but we need to get there for future generations. We need a sustainable business, and that’s the challenge. You’re always doing that on shifting sands. The business is not, and has never been, short of ideas. We have an intelligent and creative workforce, and the booksellers are awash with ideas all the time. For a small business like ours, we need to make sure we focus on the right initiatives because there are literally hundreds. It’s exciting."