Adding coffee to the mix at VicBooks

VicBooks – usually styled lower case and accompanied with a crown wearing silhouette of Queen Victoria herself – is a modern, bustling sort of bookshop.

And that’s all the time, not just at peak textbook sale times.

Juliet Blyth has been at the helm since she swapped her textbook manager role for the general manager role, taking over from Laura Kroetsch in 2001. She has notched up some major business scores at VicBooks, as The Read discovered.

VicBooks is on two campuses, the main store in the Ian Athfield designed Student Union Building on Victoria campus, the other downtown at Pipitea Campus - adjacent to the venerable Government Buildings – serving the needs of law and business students. The business is wholly owned by Victoria’s Student Association.

Right now, Blyth is buzzing about the successful addition of an espresso bar to the Victoria campus store. After much planning, the espresso bar opened in February, with the seating two large, long communal tables with plenty of chairs. Blyth and her team had done the research, and despite ‘coffee all over campus’, reasoned that there would be plenty of business if they served the very best coffee at Victoria.

“The investment cost was significant," Blyth admits. “However, with trading exceeding forecast sales our return on investment is looking positive. It was surprisingly easy to put in and with good planning and a reasonable time period it was feasible to get all the relevant consents and building work done. The espresso bar forms part of our long term strategies for business development and growth.

“Our ongoing challenge is to utitilise the opportunity of the dramatic increase in transactions and have it carry over into our business, particularly general book sales.”

The coffee supplier was carefully chosen – People's Coffee, fair trade, organic and locally roasted. Baristas were recruited, food carefully selected, though it is made off the premises. (VicBooks staff can man the till, but only baristas make the coffee.)

“It has changed the vibe in store,” says a delighted Blyth. “It feels like a place where things happen!” It has provided a big lift to business, attracting both student and university staff patronage. We are seeing students on a daily basis rather than twice a year for textbook purchases.” Year on year, store traffic has grown 170%, plus the foray into hospitality is a change from the peaks and troughs of the usual university bookshop year.

Making things happen is in fact what Juliet Blyth does superbly. That’s why VicBooks had the first e-reader offering on the New Zealand market, months before Kobo arrived. Now that EcoReader is looking overpriced compared to recently arrived opposition, she will be striving to make the price competitive.

VicBooks has 13 full time staff at Victoria including a Text Manager and a General Books Manager, and three at Pipitea. Twenty more part-timers swell the ranks for the two big text-selling seasons, at the start of the university year and again at the beginning of the second trimester.

One staff member is full time on the website, and web sales are a high proportion of business, especially as VicBooks are the official bookseller for all Open Polytechnic courses. “The website is treated as part of the store,” says Blyth. Currently they are working through another website upgrade. And yes, they blog. Last week’s feature was a guide to students as to how to time and best manage their text purchases as rush times: if you select four books, but your Eftpos only has funds for two, sorry, we don’t hold the others, it warns!
VicBooks also uses Facebook as part of its marketing strategy.

When the first week of the first trimester accounts for one fifth of the annual turnover, stringent financial management is necessary. Another success Blyth has steered the business into during her term is to build up sufficient reserves to see VicBooks through its troughs without needing loans to tide them over the low summer trading period.

Buying is key for a textbook related business, and the process is carefully scheduled to meet time targets. Making the process easier these days, says Blyth, is the fact that they can buy most of their stock in $NZ, avoiding the need to forward buy other currencies.

Also key is relationship with academics to ensure the right titles are ordered and related monographs and study material made available to support courses.

VicBooks’ 90 square-metre Pipitea store has a street frontage and is growing its general books trade as that area of the city becomes more popular. They’ve picked up tourist business from cruise ships, and yes, they too are thinking of adding coffee in store.

Blyth was happy with the size of the current Victoria campus store of 343 sq m, though she says the addition of coffee has caused a bit of a squeeze.

But bigger things are on the horizon. In November, building will start on the Campus Hub, a major new building linking parts of the campus. It is going to be three years in construction, but when finished. VicBooks will be the anchor retail tenant with a yet larger store and frontage onto Kelburn Parade.

Juliet Blyth is delighted – and unfazed. When the development was in the wind, she and others researched by going to an National Association of College stores conference in San Diego, following which they visited campus bookstores in other areas of California. You can be sure her ambition is to create a world class store in the new location.

She is optimistic too about the future of print books: “Don’t rule out the print book. It will still exist though we are likely to be offering multiple formats in association with print. On demand printing will surely play a part too.”

Creating a business isn’t just running a store. “I think success will depend on how well we integrate with our community and create links,” says Blyth. VicBooks are already doing this by sponsoring a Vic Volunteer prize and making book awards to university preparation students.

This month’s VicBooks bestsellers in general books are Gillian Turner’s North Pole, South Pole from Awa Press in nonfiction. In fiction it is David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ and the Popular Penguins reprints especially authors like JD Salinger and Jack Kerouac.

The espresso bar’s most popular snack is their cheese scone, and they grind and press coffee for a lot of flat whites, their bestseller.

With coffee, VicBooks reinvented their store in a short space of time; with techno developments and a new store in 2013, watch their space to see the textbook store of the future happen.

Website: http://www.vicbooks.co.nz/

Blog: http://vicbooks.wordpress.com/