Citation by Jenna Todd
One Sunday in 2002, Wendy received a phone call from her (now departed) friend Jill. “Your favourite bookstore is for sale,”. Second owner, Joy Draper was moving to Switzerland.
Wendy had had a recent health scare and was looking for a change from working in education – a career she had held for 30 years. So, Wendy met Joy on the Tuesday and owned Time Out by the Thursday.
Wendy had always loved reading but had no experience in retail at all – her school holiday jobs were milking cows and cooking in a rest home. She had no idea what she was doing.
Her very first sale was two CD cases that she forgot to put the discs into.
Her inherited manager told her how to swindle the till selling gift cards with cash (he’d only heard it was owned by a man – Wendy’s partner, David.)
She had no choice to keep that person on because she literally didn’t know what to do.
Susan Holmes came in asking how much she’d paid for it and Wendy told her – Susan said it was too much.
6 months in, Ross Lorimer told her what a return was and helped her pull those off the shelf.
Despite this, She learned the ropes – working all hours of the day, night and weekends. She joined the Bookseller Board. She opened the store earlier to cash in on the school traffic, installed much more shelving to make a feature of the children’s room and – when it was possible – turned the upstairs accommodation into the famous community space it is today. Wendy doubled the store’s income and won the Thorpe-bowker bookshop of the year award in her second year of ownership.
Wendy is an open book. She’s known to pull out her famous spreadsheets at an event such as this. She’s a champion of sales reps (our free employees) and her biggest piece of advice is to hire people smarter than yourself. she’s nurtured many, many booksellers in their jobs who have gone on to be publishers, editors, publicists, a lot of teachers and a few bookstore owners.
She’s fiercely protective and infinitely generous. She says she knows nothing, but is always keeping an eye on things.
Wendy has lived a lot of lives and does genuinely have a life outside of the bookshop – she’s basically Forrest Gump and if you’ve sat upstairs with her you would have heard one or more of her wild stories – including being the last person to see Jennifer Beard alive, being held up in a bank robbery and fighting off an armed neighbour and was almost a casualty of the unfortunate experiment.
She’s iconically on the front cover of Stephen Stratford’s The Dirty Decade: New Zealand in the 80s. She’s a Mother, Granny, constantly surrounded by close girlfriends and spent many hours on the back of Davids Motto Guzzi.
Wendy said during covid – that in the beginning of owning time out, she kept thinking that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. If in 1988, Sue Lees could start an incredible business as a 24-year-old, and if Joy could maintain that community spirit, surely she could continue this legacy in her 50s. Almost 24 years later, as an almost 80 year old former owner, now employee – she has certainly has succeeded.
