Bookishly Switched to a 4-Day Work Week. Here’s How You Can Do It, Too

0:00Having that extra day has just been great for people. People are able to do things like life admin on a Wednesday, and that means that they've got their weekends free for actual weekend things, which makes a huge difference. And that approach to efficiency at work has been great for us as we've last sort of year and a half or so has been a real shift from B to C towards B to B for us. Hello, welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm Shuang Esershan. So you might have heard about companies giving their employees a four-day workweek. And maybe you're thinking, that would be nice, but how would it work for my company or my employees?

0:45That's exactly what Bookishly owner Louise Verdi thought about too. And then the pandemic hit. Bookishly was actually one of the 61 companies in the UK to participate in the world's largest trial of the four-day workweek. We have Louise here today, and she's going to tell us why she's actually keeping the four-day work week permanently and what she learned during the pilot program. Thanks for joining us, Louise. Thanks so much for having me. So great to have you here. I know Bookishly sells all sorts of gifts for book lovers, and you actually saw a huge sales jump during the pandemic, which is a time where you think you need extra workers and longer working hours.

1:26But for you, it was actually the perfect time to test out the four day work week. So how did that come to be? Yeah, it was really interesting, actually. The pandemic was so hard for so many of us on so many levels. But sales wise for Bookishly, it was actually very good. People were buying gifts for friends in other countries, in other parts of the country. So online retail was obviously quite significant. we sell the right kind of little gifts for people to send to friends just like a little cheer up gift that kind of thing so it was very very busy for us but we had to completely rethink how we did things normally we would have had about 10 people in our workshop space and that just wasn't possible with social distancing so we had people working from home we had some people furloughed not working we had people kind of working in different shifts so I would be in one day my office manager would be in the next day and so we were doing all of our normal jobs with far fewer people in the same space and so it just really showed us how flexible we could be in terms of things like working from home and really changing the way that we approached every day we were kind of very much set in our ways.

2:41But then this really just changed everything. And then it made me realize that actually, maybe we can actually work out how to be efficient enough to actually have a go at a four-day week. So after the pandemic settled a bit, and I saw that Four Day Week Global were running a trial in the UK, we decided to hop on board that. I think with any big decisions like this, there's definitely a lot of areas that you examine. So for yourself, what were some of your concerns that you had when you were kind of making a pro con list about entering a four-day work week? One of the first things was delivery, being able to dispatch every day.

3:20We've always had it kind of drummed into us that customers demand quick delivery. You have to dispatch straight away. You have to offer next day delivery. And the pandemic showed us that that's just not the case, especially if you communicate things well. The Postal Service really struggled in the UK during the pandemic and international mail was very slow I think because just the lack of international travel there were just fewer planes and the Royal Mail used passenger airlines to move a lot of mail so everything just slowed down massively and people were cool with it as long as we were communicating it right people were still purchasing from us and they kind of became to understand that they needed to be a bit more organized for gifting occasions and things like that.

4:01So the first thing that we discussed was, were we going to dispatch every day or could we close on one day and not dispatch on that day, which is what we've done. And it's absolutely fine. We've got a very clear message on every product listing on our Shopify site that says when something will be dispatched. And I think that's the order deadline app. And it just says this will be dispatched on this day and you can put all the calendar dates in and people know exactly when something's going to be posted. So as long as you're clear, it's absolutely fine. So you were thinking about the business operations and logistics.

4:38On the other side, you also really wanted to involve your employees in the decision making, and you had a meeting with them. So what were some of the things you all discussed before starting the four-day workweek? Yeah, so I've involved them loads, kind of every step of the way. We discussed each point that we thought was relevant. The first thing I guess was talking about whether we're going to close one day or stagger the days off. So we discussed whether or not it would be useful to keep open for the whole five working days, but everyone have a different day off. But also people were beginning to want to work from home.

5:10Some is not possible for all of my team, but for some of my team, it is possible for them to work from home. So if you've got somebody working from home, and then they've got this extra day off in the week, and then they're covering someone else's job, it just people would hardly see each other. And also, if we stagger the days off, somebody might be in three days doing their own job but then on one other day they would be covering someone else's job and then they would have an extra day off so they'd actually only be doing their job three days of the week rather than four so we decided to all take the same day off and that seems to be working really well in fact we've had quite a few Monday public holidays here in the UK and on the days when there's a public holiday on a Monday we work so we take the Monday off and then we work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday instead and if people want the Wednesday off they can book it as holiday.

5:55But a few of us have been working four days in a row and just in recent weeks and it's really hard. Yeah, speak to us about some of those early day hurdles because you're mentioning people taking vacation, adjusting the schedule and really figuring it out. Because I think, especially in the early adoption period, it's when you figure out the new routine and the new team rituals that you build. Yeah, absolutely. There was a lot of things about the trial that we kind of we worked out beforehand in our discussions things like which day we were going to take off and choosing the day was very much a team decision but there were some things that we didn't anticipate at all and I'm really glad that that's what the trial was there for and we definitely approached it from a kind of so here's an issue how can we fix it rather than here's an issue oh okay well we can't do a four-day week then the first thing that we noticed was vacation time so during the summer holidays especially we always used to have just a very kind of relaxed policy where people could the day before you could say oh can I take tomorrow off as holiday or can I we weren't very rigid about our schedule with that and we would just manage if people needed a day off for whatever reason it would just be fine and the same for people choosing to work from home we had a member of staff who went and worked from their like family members flat for a week to look after pets and things like that.

7:14And it was just very like, yep, fine, no problem. We're very flexible. But we realised during the trial that we didn't have the capacity to be quite that flexible if we wanted to move down to a four day week. So we had a period of a few weeks where it felt very frantic. And it felt almost like, oh, gosh, is the four day week not working? Because I feel really stressed and busy. And so does some of the team. This doesn't feel like it should be. And then we realised it was because people were just off on holiday and we had to be loads more organised about it. So we had a chat about how we might approach it.

7:50And I think what we've actually got now is very similar to what most companies would just do normally anyway, which is we've got a holiday calendar. People know who they can't be off at the same time as. It's first come, first serve. Give as much notice as you can. It works fine. And people were happy to move to that kind of system in order to preserve the four day week. similarly there was an issue with errors so we found that we had less capacity for major error whilst it's really really rare it would be something like for example a whole batch of tote bags being printed with the wrong logo on the back or a whole batch of subscription parcels had the wrong thing put in them or something missing or the wrong label so if it was something that would take somebody a day or a day and a half to fix if they made that a small error we just don't have time for that and I really didn't want to to go down the route of having somebody have to use their Wednesday to fix a mistake so we just decided that if anything like that ever comes up all hands on deck everyone gets together and fixes it together everyone then takes an hour or two out of their day to do it all in one go and then that way we can just move on but we don't have to worry about whether or not we can fit it into four days I mean that is a rare thing but knowing in advance that that's how we're going to approach it if it happens it just feels kind of like a team like way of approaching it.

9:10And it means that, again, we can preserve the four-day week by just having that little process in place to make sure that that doesn't become a problem. So sounds like the pilot has been a chance for the team to get more organized and develop a system. Tell us what other effects the pilot had on the team. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely the case. I see things moving more quickly. People are more focused. I think it's like an incentive to get things done.

9:40and I definitely don't want that to be making people stressed but it does seem that people you know figuring out ways to make it work and people are really just loving the time off I think I mean we are very certain that we don't want anybody to working massively long hours on the four days that they are in to make up for the day that they're not that's definitely not how we approach it and that doesn't happen and so people are able to leave for school runs I always have to do a school run for my kids you know people are volunteering one of my members of staff is a carer and they're able to do more things with their family member that they're looking after and it's just the work-life balance side of things we always expected that to be good and it was always pretty good before anyway because we were so flexible with people's when what time of day they worked and that kind of thing but having that extra day has just been great for people people are able to do things like life admin on a Wednesday and that means that they've got their weekends free for actual weekend things which makes a huge difference and that approach to efficiency at work has been great for us as we've last sort of year and a half or so has been a real shift from b to c towards b to b for us so having to put together wholesale orders rather than individual orders means bigger size orders lower margins and needing to be more efficient so this kind of has all happened at the same time for us to be thinking in different ways about that.

11:06And it's been really useful. Definitely. I can attest to not wanting to stand in a bank line on the weekend and hearing that and having the flexibility of doing that during the week sounds very great. For the fellow founders who are contemplating this, they might be wondering about payroll or benefits. And also if it's actually something that's right for their company or industry, what other areas do you think that they need to look into and what other considerations should they check off before they take a plunge? I think it's really important to include your team in discussions beforehand as well, because they will have thought of things that you won't have.

11:49And there was a switch during the pandemic where I started thinking, why can we do this rather than why can't we do this? But in terms of the actual checklist of things to go through there was lots of practicalities about things like communicating to customers when things were going to be dispatched we also have some b2b customers that we drop ship for they needed to know what our new schedule was going to be so that they could communicate that to their customers we had to make sure that we had an out of office on a Wednesday so we actually have it on all the time that says what our working hours are which is kind of a normal thing to do anyway but it was more important for us now that we weren't there on a Wednesday and actually it's really nice we get some really lovely replies to our out of office saying oh wow you're doing a four-day week that's amazing and people are quite jealous sometimes those kind of practicalities I guess that was a really useful meeting with my team to just go through the checklist of right okay who do we need to tell and what little things do we need to make sure that we've sorted things like not having a courier collection on a Wednesday our courier driver knows our royal mail collection doesn't need to come on a Wednesday.

12:55So those little things were really important to check off. We've chatted a lot about the four-day work week. And I know that another big part of the business is how you found your niche. So we're definitely going to dig into that at the second half of our show. I'm chatting with Louise Verde, the founder of Bookishly. If you're enjoying our conversation, please follow or subscribe to Shopify Masters wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a review or feedback for the show. Thank you. So in addition to the four day work week, a part of the reason that bookishly is so successful is because you were able to find your niche.

13:34Tell us about the original start of the business and how did you eventually find your way into gifts and items related to book lovers and their interests? The first products that I made were framed book pages. So I had a vintage dictionary. Actually, it was like a well more than vintage. It was antique dictionary. And I used to do little ink and watercolor drawings. I wasn't great, but they were very simple. And then also some lettering. I did quotes and things on them. And those were some of my first sales on Etsy. Although they were on book pages, I hadn't really kind of set them out as a niche of book lovers.

14:12The quotes weren't necessarily to do with books. They were kind of general greetings. and it was all a little bit live, love, laugh, if I'm honest. And in fact, I think I actually did do that on one of them. We all did, sometimes in the 2010s. Yeah, yeah. So it was 2009, don't judge me too harshly. But I sold loads, to be honest, of that one. But yeah, so it was things on book pages, but that kind of niche hadn't really occurred to me at that stage. And also I sold some pages that were literally just the illustrations from Alice in Wonderland. So the John Tenniel illustrations in a frame, literally taken out of the book, put in a frame.

14:56And I sold some of those. That was my first sale on Etsy was those actually, six of them to Alabama. It became obvious from that point that every time I did something that was bookish, that was more popular than the very general stuff that I did. and then I kind of as I was learning I was reading entrepreneur forums a lot of reddit and things like that I was learning about the concept of a niche and I realized that it gives you something to talk about on social media it gives you endless material to work from in terms of ideas and stuff so everything just got more and more and more bookish and then I rebranded the business to bookishly and I started so the book page prints with quotes from literature on were the very main part of the business.

15:40Then I started a vintage book subscription. I also then started to employ a designer who had much more skills than me. I can put text on things, but I'm not an illustrator or anything like that. And so now I have designers working for me who are able to create all this amazing artwork that we have for our business rather than just text on things. So it just kind of grew really from noticing that it was the more niche I got, the more popular things were. It sounds like you followed very logical steps to see which items had the most interest. But from like a more strategic business viewpoint is that you were looking into the data and seeing what items resonated with the different customers.

16:24So you started to sell on Etsy, then you also sold on Not on the High Street, another online marketplace. Why was it so important to actually build your own website on Shopify? play? That was always something that I figured I needed to do at some point to begin with. I was just on Etsy and that was a really great way to just give something a go and see how people responded. And then Not On The High Street at that time, so I joined Not On The High Street in 2011, it was the route to market for businesses like ours. They had the marketing money, they had the website that was, people felt secure shopping on there and things like that.

17:01The idea of making my own website at that point was just which was transactional was kind of overwhelming and then I think it was 2014 I just decided I'm going to need to do this I can't rely on other people's marketing completely you know I will definitely be there be on Etsy and be on not on the host shoot for as long as it's useful but I can't rely on that I've now got staff and responsibilities and this is you know this is part of my household income it didn't feel right to be completely reliant on somebody else's website. So we launched a Shopify and I'd read a lot about it on Reddit. I was completely able to manage putting it together and it was quite a nice looking site for the time.

17:42And then two weeks later, we got copied by one of the massive retailers here in the UK, Marks and Spencers, brought out of print, which was almost exactly like one of ours. And so we kind of went viral. And at that point, it was only two weeks into me having my own transactional website. So that was brilliant. It was just such perfect timing. Obviously, I don't like it when big retailers copy small businesses, but it can be really good PR. So we got a lot of hits to our site. We got a fair amount of sales through our site because of it. And I think it really kind of entrenched some great links from major UK newspapers.

18:19It was quite a good start. And such an important time to have your actual own channel for sales and a place for people to find you. Tell us more about that interaction with Marks and Spencers, because it's definitely a stressful time, but you were able to actually share about your story in a very smart way on social as well. I spoke to a lawyer when I first noticed it, and he sent a letter to Marks and Spencers saying, this is clearly inspired too much by this print, and you should withdraw it. And they said, no, it's not. No, we won't. And then that was kind of it. And it's very expensive to take on a big business and the copyright laws are not particularly helpful.

19:02It was obvious to anyone looking at it that especially at that point they had clearly been to the same trade show that I was at because I could see that they had taken inspiration from my stand but then I could also see from their range that they'd taken inspiration from about three or four other stands near me at the trade show within their same seasonal release. they know what they're doing and it was probably not a great legal case even though it was very obvious what happened so I took the picture from their print and I took one of mine and I just made a picture like on on Facebook and I said this is Marks and Spencer's one and this is my one what do you think and that was it that's all I had to say it just went from there and so that got shared and shared and shared and then we had a call from a journalist at the independent and then when it went in the independent the next day I had a call from a journalist at the daily mail I questioned talking to the daily mail because I am not a fan of them but then thinking about my business being on the biggest news website in the world is a significant decision to make so I went for it and so that kind of attention I didn't have to say anything I just put it on Facebook and And it went from there.

20:21And everyone else says it for you. They didn't obviously admit to anything and they didn't pull the product, but they said they were selling through. So they weren't going to reorder the product. So they just sold what they had and left it at that. I think it just got annoying for them. For you personally, that was also a very crazy, hectic time. There's a lot of journalists reaching out to you. I believe one even showed up at your house. Yes. That was so funny. I was out with my friend and my son and my husband at the time was having a lie-in on a Sunday morning and then he's phoning me saying I've got a journalist from the Daily Mail at the door here and he stood there on the doorstep in his Batman dressing gown trying to figure out what's going on so yes it was very weird my phone's just going crazy and you know with notifications and people messaging and other people who've had similar experiences and weird times speaking to journalists And yeah, it was kind of fun, but it does get a bit overwhelming.

21:20As makers, creators or small business owners, they dream of moments of going viral. But once it happens, it's a lot to manage. So yeah, how did you make sense of everything that's happened? And were you a little scared of like how to control the narrative or how to manage it if it happens again? I mean, this was quite a while ago as well. I think going viral now is very different to when it was then. This was 2014. What I had really was my phone kind of blowing up for a couple of days and a few local radio and TV interviews and a few national newspapers. but I didn't have any negative responses I didn't read the comments on the Daily Mail which I think is pretty important but I didn't have any like messages or posts on my own Facebook or anything like that that were negative everyone was really supportive and I think I was really lucky I think things have really changed with the amount of people's lives that is now led online or on social media with how different things are with video being so much bigger I suppose if that happened to me now, I would probably make a TikTok about it.

22:31And that's a kind of really different proposition to just putting the two pictures up online. So it's more personal now, I think. So I think it was very different back then. I don't know how I deal with it now. Totally understand that. And there's so many things evolving in the space and also how you run a business. One part I want to circle back on is how you mentioned wholesale is a big part of the business. You sell to indie bookstores, museums, and libraries. How does your niche actually help you to establish those relationships? It's been wonderful. I absolutely love working with indie bookstores across the world.

23:09We've managed to kind of find, it's like another niche, you know, it's obviously the same niche, but it's a different part of it. And they're just wonderful, like these little kind of beacons of independent thought in these places, especially across North America. And they're great. And I've learnt so much from them about what they need and what their customers want so for example these indie bookstores we will often print their logo on the back of a tote or a mug or a bookmark or something like that so we've got our design but instead of putting our logo on the back we put their logo on the back because they are really important brands within their communities so within each little town they've got independent bookstore and they will hold events and they will they'll do author book signings but they'll also do drag queen story hour or you know all of these kind of wonderful things that they put on and so they become a little hub of social events and all sorts within the community so their brand is really important to them and really important to their community so by putting their logo on products even though in some ways I feel like I want my brand out there more and more by putting their logo on it makes them more engaged in that product and it makes their customers more engaged in the product it's like their own merch and that I think makes a big difference to how much they sell so those kind of things have been really great to learn about the way that bookstores work and they're such small businesses usually very often one owner operator with perhaps some help at the weekend and it's very similar to engaging b2c to engage with these kind of B2B.

24:47We get to know the people that own the stores and we get to learn from them. And there's a Facebook group of independent booksellers that have been incredibly welcoming to me and I'm able to learn what they do with their year. We're able to help them with things for Independent Bookstore Day, for Pride Month, for Black History Month and all of these amazing things. Band Book Week is like Christmas really. It's been great to learn about this sector and and to have it benefit us and them. I like what you said that the independent bookstores are like customers themselves. So it's just like managing a larger consumer account.

25:27The question here is you have so many different channels. You still sell through Not On The High Street, Etsy. You have your own online store. Now there's so many different wholesale accounts that act as customer accounts. How do you make sure that you're organized and you're able to cater to everyone in the way that they need? Ship station?

25:51Partly. There's lots of different parts of it. So there's the practical aspect of like literally managing orders through our systems. And we do use ship station. So both of our Shopify stores run through that, as well as Etsy and Not on the High Street and Cratejoy. And we keep it to itself. But I have a wholesale manager. So that makes a massive difference. We've separated that out and he is organising all of that from start to finish. So he might not fulfil the entire order himself because it might be fulfilled by a different department. But Jamie is the one who would print off the order, organise who's going to do what, when and when it's going to ship.

26:26So the way that wholesale has developed for us has meant that we've had to create a new department for it rather than it just falling into our normal orders. But then since we've done that, they've all got so efficient that it actually does feel like part of the normal orders. so that's been really useful the other part of it is the way to think about marketing differently but also using what we know from b2c marketing to talk to our indie bookstore owners because they are individual people and they are book lovers you know there's absolutely no way that anyone is going to open a bookstore for the money and they do it for the love of what they're doing So they are all readers.

27:06They are all very often passionate activists. And so, you know, these are our people.

27:16We know how to relate to them because we are that too. And that's been really useful to take what we know about how we talk to our customers and then just apply it very slightly differently to this whole sector. It seems to be working. There's definitely a lot more personal and one-on-one kind of feeling of marketing versus like a huge campaign that you're trying to speak to the masses. Talk to us about some of the approaches that you have, whether it's email or socials, that has really worked to kind of keep those relationships going online. One of the main things I love about our approach to marketing is because we've got this niche, because we know that our customers are book lovers, and actually, more specifically, our niche is classic literature, we can talk to our customers like they are the in group.

28:05So, for example, we would make a joke about Lizzie Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, and we would not explain that joke. It would be something where, if you know, you know. And that, if you know, you know, is a huge part of our whole approach to the way that we communicate with customers. we want people to feel like they're part of our social circle and or whatever and and we make jokes that they understand and they kind of love that they understand you know these are the people that would wear obstinate headstrong girl on a sweatshirt or one of my favorite quotes from Pride and Prejudice is are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted and we sell loads of those on a tote bag those kind of thing are what I think makes our customers kind of relate it's that way of communicating that means that we know they know and we all get this and sometimes you can be more obvious and there are some things which are more general so well the shades of pemberley is in a good example we have two tote bags that we sell to chatsworth house and chatsworth is the stately home here in the uk that played pemberley it was used as pemberley in the 2005 pride and prejudice movie so they take two of our tote bags they take obstinate headstrong girl and they take The Shades of Pemberley.

29:18And they sell twice as many Obstinate Headstrong Girl as they do Shades of Pemberley. Because I think Obstinate Headstrong Girl is universal. It says Jane Austen on there. And I think it's feminist vibes. You buy it for a child, you buy it for a friend. It doesn't have to be somebody who's really into Jane Austen. But The Other Shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted is something that a Pride and Prejudice fan would understand and would want. So it's a really great product it's a really good engaged product for people but it's not as universal as obstinate has strong girl and we have both of those things running all the time so we have our biggest selling quote on anything is though she be but little she is fierce which is a line from a midsummer night's dream we've sold so many things with that quote on and mostly little pink sweatshirts with the text in red and that's like thousands of them and most people probably haven't seen a midsummer night's And I'm suspecting the four-year-old girls that are wearing it haven't seen a mid-summer night stream, but it's kind of universal.

30:23But alongside that, we've got kind of obscure quotes from funny parts of Shakespeare that people wouldn't necessarily relate to without being a real fan. And by having both of them, we've got that kind of mass appeal plus legit book lover at the same time, which I think works really well. And I think for founders who are scared of being too specific on their niche, what I'm getting from our discussion is that once you kind of embrace the niche, I feel like that's what adds that shareability because it starts with friends who maybe like Jane Austen and they share something and that has that butterfly effect for them sharing with other people and other people resonating it who might have not read Jane Austen, but they have a connection to the quote in their own way.

31:10Absolutely. I think that's completely true. And I think that it's the niche gives you, it gives you a focus. It gives you something for people to get excited by. It gives you a fan base in a lot of ways. It also really focuses your design journey and things like that.

31:29But then also you can find the parts of it which are more universal. You know, we sell to book lovers, but we also sell to the friends of book lovers. if you know you've got a gift to buy and what is it about that person that I know? Oh, okay. They love books. Yeah. Let me look for something. So that is, I am a massive advocate for a niche. To wrap up the show, I really also want to highlight this one aspect I find fascinating as well is the fact that you also sell book boxes and vintage books with a special spin. I think it sounds daunting because there are so many book retailers that we know of that are huge and they really play against the pricing and the margins.