With 10 operational bookstores and many in pipeline, Om Book Shop is clearly chasing the dying habit of book reading. A go-to brand for yesteryears' book aficionados has come a long way to find its place in swanky malls next to your favourite designer brand. Ajay Mago, Director and Publisher, Om Book Shop takes us through the journey and way ahead.

We thought habit of reading books is showing a clear decline. But your retail proposition proves otherwise. What do you think?

It's true that technology like kindle and online book retail platform have arrived big time and by 2010, we experienced a sharp decline in business with advent of Amazon and Flipkart. They were able to offer incredible discounts as their advertizing and other costs are borne by large international corporations. Back then, there were only handful of bookstores and their sizes shrunk sizeably. However, interestingly enough, the overall market for readers has grown multi-folds. Technological tools like kindles and book-reading apps etc have aided readership so much that now more people are visiting offline bookstores for the look-and-feel. If we go by the report, although kindle entered the book reading arena much triumphantly, it received a decline of 28%-29% last year. This is clearly a positive sign for brick-and-mortar book stores.

Book retail is not traditional retail. What are the strategies that work in this platform?

Again, I want to cite a prediction of a 2012 report that was released in Australia, where it was said that there would be no offline bookstore in the country by 2015 but that didn't happen. At Om Book Shop, we conduct numerous surveys and we have observed that 8 out of 10 readers will like to have both book and kindle. If you ask me, who has been in the book retail since 1998, a die-hard booklover will always like to read a real book in the comfort of his/her drawing room. Very soon, we are starting a process where customers will be invited to write book reviews and we will display the same next to respective books. I guess that it will make our store more interactive.

As you already know your reader, how does your retail design and visual merchandising cater to that?

With retail design and VM, I would also like to add one more key pointer i.e. location. Book retail renders limited margin and therefore, locations are very important. Thankfully, we are also into book publishing through Om Books International and that not only help Om Book Shop to stay afloat in business but also helps us understanding our customers' minds and adopting strategies.

Second is retail design. Very recently, with our new Chennai store, we developed a design concept that will be implemented in all our future stores. Earlier, we believed in more classic design with mahogany fixtures. Now, the new model of design is adding more height (as much as 10-12 feet) with no false ceiling and ducting. The stores are using more open space, warmer lights, sitting areas, better walking aisles and interesting graphics on the walls.

If you look at our visual merchandising back in 1998, our windows used to showcase at least 100 books but now only 5-6 bestsellers are on display to grab maximum attention. We also hire VM aspirants from different institutes to develop special window. We developed a very interesting mannequin made out of newspapers at our Ambience mall, Gurgaon outlet. We are open to such innovative windows in future.
Tell us about your retail expansion plans.

One store in Mumbai will soon be open and we are planning to open 3 more stores in Chennai. Our focus cities for retail expansion in next couple of years will be Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata.