Small Business caught up with Deborah Maclaren, co-owner and CEO of LoveReadingthe online bookstore with a social conscience, and one of three winners of the Small Business x Sage Pop-up Shop competition.
LoveReading was one of three winning companies selected by our panel of experts to occupy a pop-up shop on London’s busy Oxford Street earlier this month.
LoveReading is an online bookstore that donates 25 percent of the retail price you pay for physical books to a school of your choice to purchase library books. And every book listed has its retail price reduced by 10 percent.
The brand allows book buyers to actively support their local school, with a percentage being donated to schools in disadvantaged areas. Sixty percent of teachers say they don’t have money to buy books for their students.
Deborah Maclaren became managing director of the Love Reading brand portfolio in mid-2018, but has worked in media for 25 years. After starting at Conde Nast in the mid-1990s, Deborah Maclaren became sales manager at Future Publishing in London and then commercial director at Highbury House, where she looked after the portfolio of more than 45 magazines.
What is Love Reading?
It’s an online bookstore with a difference. We’ve been around since 2005 and our brand is all about book recommendations. We were one of the largest book recommendation websites in the UK, but we decided to start selling books. We knew we had to do something different to be unique, so we decided to open a bookstore with a social purpose.
When you go to LoveReading, you have the option to donate 25 percent of your purchase price to a school of your choice so they can purchase books. In the last few months since we launched as an online bookstore, we have donated books worth £25,000.
Where did the idea for LoveReading come from?
I have been headteacher of a small church school in south east London for the last eight years and have experienced the nightmare of balancing a budget. It is one of the biggest school management issues of our time. The per pupil funding we have now as a school is broadly the same as it was in 2010. Schools have to make really difficult decisions — can we afford heating or library books? Or do we get rid of our teaching assistants? We wanted to do something to restore that balance to our children’s side Love Reading 4 Kids is so big and so trusted — and we know that tens of thousands of people use us to find either their child’s first or next favorite book — we knew we had an engaged audience.
Reading for pleasure is so important and there is so much research showing that reading has a greater impact on our children’s outcomes than anything else — be it their social demographic profile or what their parents do.
Is this a way for adults to purchase books in a way that gives back to the schools their children attend?
Absolutely. If your child goes to school, you will be asked at the checkout: Would you like to donate? You enter the name of the school and the school receives a notification. When she checks into her dashboard, she can see the total. We then provide schools with a range of resources to help them tell parents and carers all about us. The school can say, “If you buy books, please contact LoveReading because it is a new source of income for us, a new source of funding that helps us buy books that are difficult to buy.”
What made you want to enter the Small Business and Sage Popup Shop Contest?
One of the challenges of running a small business is having no money, especially when you give away 25 percent of your profits.
We have a really small and incredibly passionate team who completely believe in what we do, but we have no PR or marketing resources. For us, this was really an opportunity to show what we do to a different, broader audience. For us, this was an incredible opportunity to be physically present for the first time.
What advice would you give to anyone thinking about entering the next Sage Pop-up Shop competition?
It was a pleasure. It made us think: yes, we can do this, we can do physical events. All I would say is just take this opportunity. Take your time to apply. Since we are a completely remote company, it was just great for us. The support we have received from Sage and Small Business has been brilliant. It was just a seamless, brilliant experience.
More about the Sage Pop-up Shop Contest
Sage Pop-up Shop Winner #2 – Katie Cross, Cake or Death – Katie Cross, manager of vegan bakery Cake or Death, sits down with Small Business to tell us about her experience winning the Sage pop-up competition
Sage Pop-Up Shop Winner #3 – Katie Hanton-Parr, Baboodle – Katie Hanton-Parr, founder of Baboodle, tells Small Business what winning the Sage Pop-up Shop competition means to her online baby gear subscription business
