Bound For Success

Few can lay claim to seeing off global retail behemoth Amazon with barely a scar to show.

- Alan Deans

Tony Nash, co-founder of online bookstore Booktopia, is someone who has. At first the challenge seemed daunting. Nash had been working on a $40 million sharemarket raising and float. A prospectus was ready to go and investor roadshows were scheduled when, late in 2016, a week before setting the share price, Amazon announced that it was opening an Australian website to sell a cornucopia of goods. The float was scrapped.

“The fund managers said, ‘We aren’t going to invest in you. You are going to be annihilated,’ ” recalls Nash. But nothing happened. “There was no challenge from Amazon. It was really helpful because people can now see that they are no threat at all. They are focusing on other product lines.” To prove his point, Booktopia’s annual sales have soared since then from $80 million to an estimated $130 million in the past financial year as Nash invested feverishly to expand into a new warehouse and stock more titles. He now has reset his sales goal to hit $500 million and is mulling over a launch into Asia.

“One door closed and another 10 opened,” he explains. “When you are in business, things come out of left field that you don’t expect. If you ride the emotional rollercoaster, you keep going up and down. I keep my temperament flat. If you do that, the longevity in business is protected. The thing about the book industry is that it’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s an industry where there’s 27 million books or products. The size of the databases is massive. Holding the stock is huge. Publishers are nondigital. It really appeals to me.”