Bookspeed boss reflects on record year as wholesaler boosts its 'non-traditional' base

Edinburgh-based Bookspeed might have been the first in the British book distribution game to close down operations in the wake of the coronavirus. Partially,  that was due its market: it is a specialist wholesaler, with the bulk of its business helping to build tailored ranges for retailers in the heritage and gift market, and those shops were shutting at a rate of knots.

Managing director Lewis Dawson explains: “Our serviceable customers were shrinking and there was the viability of it all—was it worth it keeping the lights on in the warehouse? But the most important reason for us existing is to create secure, well-paid jobs and once the government came out with the furlough scheme, I could see our people and their incomes would be supported. The government strategy to save the greatest number of lives is obviously about limiting contact with others and staying indoors... As much as I love to believe the work we do is essential, in the big picture I think anyone running a business has to think, ‘Is my work contributing to the fight against [coronavirus]?’ If the answer is no, what are you doing staying open? It was a clear decision given the values of our company.”

Stopped in its tracks
Bookspeed is topping up the 80% of salaries the furlough scheme will cover (up to a value of £2,500 per month), so that its employees receive full pay, though it will have to review that as the crisis goes on. The shame is that the work stoppage comes as the company is in a real purple patch. Its financial year concluded at the end of February—“before the carnage hit”, Dawson laughs ruefully—with record revenues of £12.5m, double the figure the wholesaler posted just four years ago. Though it is based in Scotland, 75% of its revenue is from England, which it has been selling into for around 15 years.

Shutting down, Dawson believes, was “the easy part. The difficulty will be reopening, because there won’t be one Monday [when simultaneously] all the shops are back open. It will be a weird, piecemeal, slow process as people progress back to some semblance of normality.”

Bookspeed services around 1,600 customers, both large entities and indies, in both the heritage and museum market. Key clients include Chatsworth House, National Trust of Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland (the equivalent of English Heritage) and, in the gift sector, the likes of Oliver Bonas, Fenwick, gadget chain Menkind and Wicklow-headquartered Avoca.

Dawson sees difficulties come the end of the lockdown. “I don’t think it will change people’s psychology for the market we serve, which is shops where people go to engage with interesting products—that’s why books do so well in that environment. But I do think the crisis will finish off a good number of retailers on the high street in general. I suspect it will have a more profound impact on medium and large retailers than [on] small ones, partly because of the current structures of the government support schemes, but also because of the risk profile of retailers with large estates, and the pressure on them with rents and rates. It will all come down to how long the restrictions are in place and what further measures the government will come out with, because clearly they are going to have to do more than they have so far.”

Ladybird flight
The exponential rise in sales in the past four years was part of well-thought-out growth strategy which included revamping the sales force and how it engaged with customers, investing a lot in online systems— particularly its back-end account management platform— and adding a new warehouse. But it also had a wee bit to do with Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, the authors of the Ladybird for Grown-Ups parody series.

Dawson says: “The Ladybird books hit the zeitgeist and a lot of retailers that previously wouldn’t have had books as part of their offering suddenly thought, ‘Right, how do I get books into my shop?’ We were the people they looked to because we had been in the sector for a while. It gave us a foot in to say, ‘Yeah the Ladybirds are great, but there is a whole world of stuff we can get for you to enhance what you are offering.’”

It has been an education, though, not necessarily for non-book retailers but for publishers, who Dawson believes have upped their design game to get in the so-called non-traditional market. “I don’t like ‘non-traditional’; it is such a dismissive term,” he says. “I like to think of it as new business. We really believe there is a book for everyone, and a lot of the customers we serve won’t ever go into a bookshop. We’ve talked a lot to the trade to get the message across that the books we sell aren’t competing with other books, but with other products, so they have to stand out as a physical object... I think publishers see the potential. There aren’t many sales categories that are growing at the rate we’ve been growing at. And I don’t just mean our growth, but the overall gift market, as our competitors have done well, too.”

Blood lines
During our talk Dawson often circles back to the values of the company, which he knows intimately. His parents, Kingsley Dawson and Annie Rhodes, founded the company in 1986 when they moved from London to Scotland, initially as a distributor for radical, feminist, environmental and LGBTQ titles, before branching into the heritage and gift market a few years later. The younger Dawson wasn’t handed the business. In fact, when he told his parents he wanted to join Bookspeed rather than go to university, they were vehemently against it. (Older brother Patrick went a completely different route, becoming a judo professional and representing Scotland at the Commonwealth Games.)

After months of arguing Dawson the younger finally won out, and was allowed to start at an entry-level job (“it was the opposite of special treatment”). He worked his way up, becoming part of the management when his parents stepped back from the day-to-day running of the business in the early 2010s, and he became m.d. in 2018.

Dawson says: “We are a business owned by a family rather than a family business, per se. There’s no legacy stuff, it’s not expected that I’ll do this until I have a child who is of age, then they’ll do it. But this is a good business. We have great colleagues and interesting things, so why wouldn’t we want to keep doing it?”