That's it! Another Christmas done and I don't know how it was for you but I'm exhausted... I'd like to say that I enjoyed the festive period but in work terms it was horrible. (In personal terms mind you it was lovely and I'm 'resting' between Christmas and New Year this time around which is a first in a number of years - hence the time to finally update the website). In business terms, for the chain of bookshops I'm currently working for it was a lot of hard work for not a lot of gain. The 'credit crunch' (god, I hate that term - not only does it sound horrible it actually means very little - 'there's a contraction of money that never existed to start with' - we might be forced to live on the money that we actually own rather than the money that we borrowed off someone else, I'm sorry but that doesn't sound so bad to me) has hit everyone in Ireland hard and combined with a strong exchange rate against sterling there was very little selling in Irish shops this Christmas. Now, it has to be said, Irish retailers have had it too easy for too long, people have been paying over the odds for their goods for a long time and retailers have been resting on their money bags for quite a while now. However, rather than taking a practical stance on the situation and offering customers a fair deal there's just been a lot of moaning from customers and retailers alike about how awful it all is.
Anyway, needless to say, the pressure has been on and everyone has had a stressful time. Here's hoping that even if 2009 doesn't bring an end to the recession (which is quite likely and not necessarily such a bad thing) that people will begin to get a bit of perspective on what it really means - that we can't consume quite as much and that we learn to value the things that we have. I was reading lovely Hereward's blog on www.yellow-lightedbookshop.co.uk about his nightmarish shopping trip in the run up to Christmas and whilst the words 'rose-tinted' spring to mind he does have a point - it's important that we remember that we get what we give, and by giving in the right way we ultimately receive more (and not in a materialistic way!).
So, we stand on the brink of 2009 - what will it bring? For me, the same resolution as last year must apply - I will open the Gutter Bookshop. I guess I should be nervous about doing this during the recession but for me it seems to open more possibilities than close them. There's more commercial property coming on the market and rents are becoming (slightly) more realistic. I've been squirreling away money like there's no tomorrow which all helps. So fingers-crossed that 2009 is the year. I wish the best to you and yours.
Finally, time to catch my breath! It's been a manic couple of months with a Christmas Campaign to put together and a new store to open (not my own sadly!). But with those two major projects put to bed I'm finally able to get my head together slightly and start to look at the future again.
It can be strange working for someone else and watch them making decisions that you don't agree with (and knowing full well that they're not going to work). In my case, I try to get my 'warning shot' in so that I feel I've done my duty but then you have to stand back and let the thing go. As you will have heard, life for retail on the High St is hard at the moment and Dublin is no exception. Books tend to hold up fairly well in a time of recession but they're not bulletproof and the bosses are worried. This has resulted in lots of frantic 'we have to do something' meetings and has resulted in all sorts of weird and wonderful solutions coming to light - some of them good, some of them... not so good. Anyway, with Christmas imminent we're implementing some interesting sales drivers into the stores so we'll have to see what happens. In the meantime, my lovingly prepared Christmas Catalogue has hit the shelves so we'll see what results that brings too.
On the Gutter front it's been very quiet, swamped by the day job as ever. It keeps ticking away in my head though - possibly as an escape mechanism for the madness of working for other people. I'm not sure what 2009 will bring but I hope it'll be the year where I finally make that step into owning my own business.
And another 2 months have flown by, so much for my dream of having the Gutter open for Christmas 2008. Actually, Christmas is all I can think about at the moment as I'm right in the middle of the preparing the Christmas catalogue for my current job. How easy it is to forget that this isn't normal, it isn't until I see the faces of friends when I tell them that I need to have Christmas finished within the next 3 weeks that you realise how odd retail can be. I've already had one discussion about coloured baubles this year and I'm sure there's plenty more to come.
Anyway, I did have a bit of breakthrough this weekend when I first managed to put a 'shape' on this year's Christmas campaign. There's obviously a lot of doom and gloom flying around at the moment about 'tightening our belts' and retail on the whole is sufferring badly. I have asked myself whether I would really want to be opening a business in the current climate but I do believe that there is always space for a good business, it's the ones that fail to adapt that suffer the worst. In many cases this may give the independent the advantage, by offering an alternative and being able to respond to your customers' needs quickly you stand a good chance of making it through.
Part of the reason why it's taken me so long to update the site is that I had an extended break over in the USA, California to be exact. It was strange, I thought the independent bookshops had all been swamped by huge conglomerates but in fact, throughout the trip, I discovered many busy and obviously popular small bookshops. There certainly seemed to be more secondhand and antiquarian bookshops than we have in either the UK or Ireland. I wonder why that is? It did give me some hope though that there's a space for eveyone in the market - as long as you're aware of your competitor's strengths and your customer's needs.
Right, back to Christmas and the big books... Roll on the New Year (hitting in late September for me)...
Crikey, how quickly a month can fly by! It's now 4 weeks since I started my new job as a book buyer at Head Office, buying in new books for the Company's shops. It's been a somewhat hectic experience with my first task being 20,000 books for a new shop that opened last week. A task that shouldn't actually be that difficult as long as the foundations are already in place. Sadly, they weren't so they had to be laid before I could start building the house (to use a slightly dodgy analogy).
Anyway, the new shop opened last week full of good books and I'm proud of my work, it was good to see a project through, even if the timeline was somewhat shorter than I would have liked.
It's strange being back in an office again. The up-side is that I don't spend my days as a focal point for questions - both from the staff and customers. I have much more control over the way that I work and get to work on developing solutions to problems rather than just whingeing on about the things that don't work due to 'Head Office'. The downside is that you're in an office in the middle of nowhere with the same people and their issues everyday. It's a strange environment to be in and I'm still not sure I like it.
On the Gutter front there's not been a lot happening as you might have guessed. To be honest, I'm not sure what to do now. This new job is developing well and will certainly keep me busy for the next few months but in the end it's not my dream. People around me are still encouraging me to 'go for it' but I'm slightly depressed by the lack of decent commercial property coming onto the market. Every new lead turns out to be either the wrong size, wrong location or way too expensive. I'm off on holiday next week for a much needed break and I hope that a bit of distance may help me realise where my priorities lie. The Gutter will come at some point but at the minute I'm not sure when...
Bank Holiday weekend in Ireland and for once I'm taking it easy, 2 days of lie-ins and much reading and I'm feeling an awful lot better for it (nothing very strenuous on the book front either - the final part of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeous trilogy for teens followed by 'My Cousin Rachel' by Daphne Du Maurier). I am in the bookshop tomorrow though for what will be my last day... It's all come around so quickly but 10 days ago I accepted a new job as a Book Buyer for the company I'm currently working for which means I'll be swapping the city-centre shopfloor for a little desk in an industrial park in North Dublin. To be honest, I'm still in two minds about it, it was a hard decision to make for all kinds of reasons but the principal one was around whether it would distract me again from opening up the Gutter. In the end though I had to accept that I can't sit and twiddle my thumbs until the right property comes along and one benefit of the new job is more money which has got to help. I was also going slightly mad where I was, 18 months is a long-time to be racing around full pelt in a City Centre bookshop and I was putting in an awful lot of hours, great if it's your own business your building but not so great if it's all to line someone else's pockets. Anyhows, we'll see how it all goes, if it doesn't work out then I guess it'll be a sign that it's time for me get on and get the Gutter open.
A month or so back, lovely Hereward from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop 'memed' me. According to the rules of the game you reach for the nearest book, turn to page 123, find the 5th sentence and write down the following 3 sentences. Quite where the phrase 'meme' comes from I don't know (it's probably something obvious but I just can't see it). Now, considering the nearest book to hand was the Concise Oxford Dictionary (I'm lost without my dictionary, thesaurus and book of quotations) I decided that a definition of the word 'bodge', although somewhat apt, was unlikely to get anyone excited so I stretched my arm a little further and picked up the topmost book from the stack on my bedside table... which was, strangely enough, one of Richard Templar's business books: "The Rules Of Management".
"When talking to staff it is head up. When talking to customers it is head up. At the end of a long and busy day, when you go to bed, you can do head down - and go to sleep knowing you've been big and bright and bold all day"
Now, I'm not a huge fan of business books as a whole, I tend to find that they're great at diagnosing problems and a bit rubbish at finding real solutions, but I do put a lot of store by this one. It reinforces all those things that you believe are the 'right thing to do' as a Manager but so rarely see in modern businesses. This is the one book I keep going back to, especially on those days when you feel like you're just not getting anywhere.
I'm not sure I'll be passing on the 'meme' thread - I can't think of 5 bloggers I know who wouldn't have had it already (well, I can think of 2 but considering they currently work with me I'm not sure telling them about The Gutter would be overly helpful at the moment!) but thank you to Hereward for making me dig out these words which have already made me feel better about today...
Hello again! Just a quick one tonight after a busy day of selling books to busy people - I wish the 'In Praise of Slowness' brigade would get a move on and convert everyone to their life in the slow lane mantra (but perhaps that's missing the point...). Anyway, life for me ticks on, I'm just back from a few days down in Cork where I popped in and visited Bookstór, a wonderfully small but perfectly formed bookshop in Kinsale. Apparently they were shortlisted (or may even have won - must check!) Best New Bookshop of the Year 2008 in the Bookseller Retail Awards. Not overly excited for you non-booksellers out there but quite exciting for me. (As an aside, it's a bit of a running joke through the booktrade that bookshops have a tendency to refer to 'non-book' - any item like bookmarks, greeting cards, notebooks that you regularly find for sale in bookshops but is not actually a book. The division of the world into 'books' and 'non-books' is a trifle odd when you think about it, but also rather nice.) Anyway, my visit to Bookstór got me all fired up again and I came straight back and phoned a property agent about a possible shop. Of course it was ludicrously over-priced and beyond my means but if I can keep plugging away at it the right unit will come along (I'm not completely under-estimating how much a shop costs, honest! It's just a question of finding one the right size in the right area.)
In the meantime I am thrilled that my old boss from Ottakar's in Cheltenham, Hereward Corbett, opened the doors of his new independent bookshop The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop in Tetbury, Gloucestershire on Saturday and it looks beautiful. Log-on to his blog and have a look (he's very funny... in a good way), and if you're in the area go and buy a book from him.
Ah, a quiet Sunday at home and as the weather is murky there's a perfect excuse to stay indoors and catch-up on my reading and the website. I've just finished 'The Yacoubian Building' by Alaa Al Aswany, a light and very readable novel which somehow also manages to encapsulate the politics and religion of modern Egypt, worth picking up in my opinion. This morning I started 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by Thomas Hardy, I've been in Hardy mode for the past few months working through the novels I hadn't managed to get around to before, so this comes hot on the heels of 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and 'The Return of the Native', perhaps I just need a break from the modern world?
Apart from that, there's not a lot to report. I checked out the retail unit mentioned below and as I suspected the agent was looking for a wheelbarrow full of money (€100,000n as key money to start with!) so that's a definite no go... I spent a day looking back over the business plan thinking it would need some updating since it was written a year ago but surprisingly it was still in perfect shape, and I even impressed myself with its thoroughness. So, I'll just keep an eye out for the elusive unit and get ready to spring into action on the as and when. In the meantime, I'm squirreling away money as fast as I can with the knowledge that the more I can put in myself the less I'll have to borrow off other people.
Quick update! As mad busy as ever without the energy to get everything done but plans are still forming in my head. An interesting property has come on the market in the location I was looking at. The agent seems to be a bit old-fashioned in the fact that there's no details on the web so I'm having to hunt him down by phone (at least I don't have to write a letter...) No doubt it'll be an extortionate amount of money but fingers crossed. I'm finally starting to come out of the winter blues which means that my energy levels are on the rise as well so fingers-crossed that something actually comes of it this time around. I hate to think of my lovely business plan getting mouldy in a drawer.
Another rainy day in Dublin and all I want to do is sleep. The past couple of months have been as hectic as ever (although I'm sure that this is supposed to be a quiet time for book sales...). As usual there has not been much progress on the Gutter front. The plan is still there and I remain committed to opening the shop as soon as possible but the time just doesn't quite feel right. There's a lack of decent proprty available (and what there is is grossly over-priced for its potential), my current job is driving me mad but progressing well. Yesterday we held a book signing with Kathleen Turner (of Prizzi's Honour/Romancing the Stone/Peggy Sue Got Married fame) and next week we'll be hosting Jacqueline Wilson and 300 children for her new book (I'm expecting lots of fun and a terrible headache...).
Apart from that we continue to work on developing staff and the store's potential. Personally I've been suffering from the winter blues... Apparently 1 in 5 people in Ireland suffer from some degree of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and given the rain and dark days I'm not surprised. I've invested in a lightbox which you're supposed to sit in front of for 45 minutes a day but finding the time is never easy and so I've taken to going for a walk every lunchtime in order to try and get some sunlight into my head!. Bring on the Spring that's what I say...
Happy New Year! Seems so long ago already but I'm still recovering from the madness that is Christmas on the High Street. I swear it turns into a mini riot at times... Anyway, another successful season for my current shop which is gratifying and reassuring but also spurs me on to do it for myself. New Year was spent over in Scotland where I visited The Watermill bookshop, gallery and cafe in Aberfeldy, Perthshire. It's a great place serving tea and cakes as well as having a great range of books given their size. And, like Jaffe and Neale below, it was shortlisted for Independent Bookseller of the Year after winning the Scottish heat. All of this, combined with a great deal of snow, made my New Year's resolution to be '2008 is the year that the Gutter Bookshop happens'. So I'd better get to work!
I'm back on a property hunt. I'm still waiting for my money to get sorted but it shouldn't be a problem for much longer so now I just need to find the premises. Of course, at the moment thee doesn't seem to be much around and there's nothing in my preferred areas so we're back to the waiting game? Is it wrong to hope someone else goes out of business so that you can have their premises? I suppose it is if it's another bookshop (presumably you'd also want to be cautious about trying the same thing in the same place!) but if it's an internet cafe or an rubbish shoe shop I reckon it's allowed...
In the meantime, I need to get my business plan checked over again and check those staffing levels... the thing that struck me about both The Watermill and Jaffe and Neal was that they both had more staff than I'd planned on. Presuming that they're not just throwing their money away, which seems unlikely given that both businesses looked very tightly run, it looks like I might need to up my staffing guess-timates. Let's just hope that the figure at then end of it all is still a black one and not a red one...
