[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Elliott Management bought Waterstones Booksellers last year.

Yup.

From the WSJ:

Elliott, best known recently for its shareholder-activist campaigns, is increasingly pushing into private-equity investments and in 2017 hired Paul Best to head its European private-equity arm. Mr. Best led the purchase of Waterstones, which Elliott bought in a deal worth roughly $279 million.

Under Mr. Daunt, Waterstones rebounded from a period of losses and—unlike many other retailers—has been opening new stores, which it fashions to feel like independent shops.

It now has roughly 290 locations, mainly in the U.K. and Ireland, and revenue in its most recent fiscal year was about £400 million ($508 million).

They're fronted by James Daunt, who fixed Waterstones by ditching payola and going hyperlocal: letting individual store managers select their stock and store layout according to local tastes.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...rned-to-profit

With a mixture of tough love and an unshakeable belief in the power of the physical book, which seemed quixotic in the era of e-readers and online discounting, Daunt began to turn things around. He closed underperforming stores and fired 200 booksellers, at the same time as declaring that his managers would be given back responsibility for their own stock, because what sold in Hampstead might not go down well in the Highlands. One of his boldest moves was to inform publishers that he would no longer do business through sales reps and they could no longer buy window space – which meant turning his back on £27m a year.

Instead, a small team of buyers – in close consultation with Daunt himself – would select titles to feature as books of the month across all the stores, while individual managers were free to tailor much of their stock to their customers’ tastes.

He even tried renaming individual stores with different local names, to see if the Waterstones name might be a liability.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/sh...e_iOSApp_Other

In comparison to the rest of the chain, the new Waterstones branches are tiny – Southwold’s new shop is a mere 700sqft, barely room to swing a cat in hat. In comparison, the smallest Waterstones is 2,500sqft. “What people expect when they see the brand is a lot of books, but when you walk into something no bigger than a London bus, then it has got to be different,” he says.

The new shops have opened in previously empty properties, he says, in towns long abandoned by the book trade.

https://www.newstatesman.com/microsi...in-s-bookshops

“If you’re sitting centrally and you send out the same books to Middlesbrough as to Hampstead, you’re going to have an awful lot of books in the wrong shops. If you let Middlesbrough order what they want and Hampstead order what they want, they will be dramatically more accurate and nuanced. “What’s more, says Daunt, “they have the responsibility for selling the books. So if they’ve ordered in ten copies of your new biography, they put it front and centre and they sell the thing.” Each branch of Waterstones was now, to some extent, an independent bookshop.

It was not easy for Daunt to persuade his centralised management to relinquish control over what was sold in their shops. “To marketeers, it’s a heresy to let every bookshop do absolutely whatever it likes.” To illustrate the difference it makes giving autonomy to booksellers, Daunt opens his tablet and finds a recent email from a publisher whose daughter recently started working at Waterstones. The young woman is sat at her kitchen table, hours before she is due to begin work, hand-painting pieces for a window display. “A chain retail marketeer would have blue-eyed fit about that,” chuckles Daunt. “If Boots allowed staff to sit at their breakfast tables, painting things...! But in a bookshop, that would make the shop more fun, more vibrant. And clearly the bookseller is invested in selling that book. They are only selling that book because they love it.

“But, and it is quite a big but, there is accountability. You can do whatever you like, but it’s got to be friendly, positive, and it’s got to work. If you start doing pretentious, convoluted, awful, ugly, we’ll knock on the door.”

For now, however, there are two numbers upon which this skills-based approach can be judged. It’s possible that Daunt, as a bookseller, takes the most satisfaction from his rate of returns: 97 per cent of the books on shelves in every Waterstones in the country are bought by customers. His employer is probably more interested in operating profit, however, which reappeared for the business last year for the first time in seven years.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/el...06?mod=hp_econ

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/barn...200740516.html

This could be good for B&M pbook buyers.
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On the other hand, Daunt is no fan of ebooks. At least in the UK.

https://the-digital-reader.com/2012/...ibrary-ebooks/