Powell’s success story adds a chapter

Star among booksellers grabs 60,000 square feet for staff

By Lisa Baker

The Portland Tribune, Mar 19, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Like toes growing out of an old pair of tennis shoes, Powell’s Books is expanding again.

On the heels of opening a new warehouse in 2002, which added 60,000 square feet of book-stacking room for its online inventory, the big daddy of Portland’s biblio world is moving its burgeoning Powells.com staff. Currently at Northwest 10th Avenue and Couch Street across from the company’s flagship store at 1005 W. Burnside St., the employees will move to a 60,000-square-foot building at Northwest 29th Avenue and Industrial Street.

David Weich, director of development and marketing for Powell’s Books, says the building takes the place of the store’s 10,000-square-foot staff quarters and adds enough space to store another half-million books, bringing the company’s available inventory to about 2 million books.

Weich says that while in-store sales are posting small, single-digit gains each year, Powells.com, the now 10-year-old online arm of the store, is bounding ahead in business.

In 2002, the dot-com’s sales constituted about 30 percent of Powell’s sales. This fiscal year, with sales already topping 2003 figures by about 15 percent, the online Powell’s presence brings in 40 percent of the company’s revenues.

The explosion of interest has necessitated a tripling of online operations staff in just four years. Powells.com now employs about 60 people, still tiny in comparison with the company’s retail complement of about 460.

Web ‘store’ on rise

The company’s success comes at a time when most booksellers are holding on by their dust covers and many online ventures have torpedoed. The major online book retailers are trying to turn the page on several years of financial losses. In 2003, after $150 million in losses the year before, Amazon.com reported that it had turned its first annual profit; Barnesandnoble.com announced the good news that its shareholder losses this year fell from 7 cents to 5 cents per share.

Powells.com’s rise is a testament to paradox. The company, like its competitors Amazon and Barnes & Noble, has a broad inventory, but it doesn’t market itself to everyone. Nor does it romance a particular demographic, Weich says. Instead, it targets customers ideologically, aiming at someone who’d rather feast on sociocultural critiques like “Fast Food Nation” than the latest John Grisham novel.

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