On Creating Niche with Myrthe Spiteri
Recently we had the rare opportunity to speak with Myrthe Spiteri, owner of the amazing Blossom Books. Her love for reading inspired her to build a dream business. Read below for more about her client and products driven approach, inspiration, and tactics that has helped contribute to her team’s long-term success.
What led you to start your online business?
When Blossom Books started, it was part of uitgeverij Kluitman. Their initial vision was to create a brand for books for girls but as I was promoted to acquiring editor, I decided there is more to young adult readers than just teenage girls who like to read about love. At the beginning of this year I bought Blossom Books: we’re now an independent publishing house, and I can build this brand totally like I want to. I want to cater to every teenage reader there is: boys and girls, fiction and nonfiction lovers. I believe everyone can love reading, you just have to find the right book. We try to publish those books that teenagers WANT to read, and will leave their computers and phones for, just because they want to lose themselves in our pages.
Are your customers returning to your store to buy again?
Whereas normally people don’t really pay attention to what publishing house their books come from, our readers buy our books because they trust our judgement and they know we deliver good quality. By interacting with our customers on social media, they can follow the whole publishing process and we usually already have fans waiting for the release of a new book before it’s even launched.
I guess the secret recipe is to be open and real. Only make products you love, and don’t fake it if you don’t really love something because your customers will know immediately — and if YOU don’t like your brand, why should they? Listen to them, use their advice whenever you can, and hand them the pickle jar every once in awhile.
What is your opinion on this multi-channel sales trend?
As a publishing house we heavily support brick bookstores and we can’t do without them. Who doesn’t love browsing a cosy bookstore, filled with hundreds of different books, and getting that one book you never expected because you got a great recommendation from a book seller? Our online shop is not aimed at ‘stealing’ clients from brick bookstores, but rather to cater to those people who don’t have a good bookstore with our merch close by.
Is it true that the book selling industry is divided into three seasons: fall, winter, and spring?
Well, that’s the way the product planning works world wide, it’s not something I can agree or disagree with. Usually publishers make 3 catalogues in which they announce their coming books. The following periods include:
- Fall catalogue: September — January
- Spring catalogue: Januari — May
- Summer catalogue: May — September
How important is a fast shipping / order processing time for you? Do you think this is important for your potential customers or not a priority?
Our merchandise products are so niche that people don’t mind waiting a little longer. We even started to decrease our ordering frequency to 2x a week and it didn’t make a big difference. We do offer customers the option to leave a note when they need something quicker so we can make an exception for them and ship it sooner, for example when they have a birthday coming up.
Do you act on the statistics that claims that 74% of customers rather buy more items from one merchant to get cheaper / free delivery?
We ship for free with every purchase above €25.
The holiday season is very close. Do you prepare for it in any specific way?
We did prepare for Black Friday with a 25% discount on all items in our shop. We have some special prices for Sinterklaas and Christmas, and we prepare for Christmas with a 12 Days of Christmas campaign, during which we have new sales and promotions during the 12 (work) days leading up to Christmas.
Will you organize your staff according the data shown in MonkeyData charts to help with increased traffic and orders during the holiday season?
I’ve hired a marketing student for the coming months to draft the campaigns and to follow up on them. She uses the MonkeyData charts to see on what day and what time she should post her social media posts and our intern from business economics has checked if all sales are worthwhile and how many extra we need to sell to make our ‘loss’ back. They have to work together in interpreting the figures from MonkeyData to make our sales grow. MonkeyData gives us information we didn’t get from our shop software. We now plan our campaigns around best selling products, products with the highest revenue, best selling days and hours, and we can track social media advertisement better now, too.
Any words of advice for our readers?
Believe in yourself and reach for the stars; If you’re not the one doing that, why would others do that for you?
