Lynsey Pollard picks up her phone from the kitchen table and pans the camera around to reveal dozens of boxes stacked through the living room behind her. “There’s another bookcase full downstairs and some in the hallway,” she says. “You should have seen it two months ago; you could barely move. We even had to store them under the bed.”
It’s been a hectic three months for the director of Little Box of Books, a subscription service for children’s books she runs with her partner Neil Langston from their London flat. In mid-March, just before the coronavirus lockdown, they took the risk of ordering a three-month supply of books instead of the normal one-month’s supply.
“We had no idea how business would go, how our suppliers would manage or if they’d even exist afterwards,” Pollard says. “We wondered what would happen if one of us got sick. Neil also runs an IT consultancy and we’ve got an 18-month-old and a six-year-old to look after. For a two-person business, it was quite intimidating.”
Fortunately, the family has stayed healthy. And with schools closed for months, the demand for children’s books has rocketed. “We’ve just had to restock after selling out of books for nought-to-seven-year-olds last month,” says Pollard. “Visits to our website tripled from March to April, with 90% of traffic from new visitors. We sold the most books we’ve ever sold in a month.”
Pollard credits Google tools for the surge. “Google My Business has helped us to help our customers,” she explains. “We could let them know we were still open for business and fully stocked up. It is amazing to have a versatile and visible storefront apart from the website that drives traffic to our products, helping people to find us and trust us.”
For Pollard and Langston, who founded the company in 2018 with the aim of bringing greater diversity to kids’ bookshelves at home and in school, this enhanced ability to create awareness of their product and capitalise on it is central to not just their business, but to their mission.
Pollard, who previously worked in charity communications, had the idea during a period as a single mum to her eldest son. “I just didn’t see our family in any of the stories I was reading to him.” Now, each month, after scouring scores of publishing lists, she sends customers hand-wrapped books and other learning resources that include characters with different racial backgrounds, disabilities, step-parents, single parents, two mums, two dads and anything else that more accurately reflects the society we live in.
At about the same time they launched Little Box of Books, a study was released that gave statistical evidence to reinforce their own reading experiences. The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s report found that just 4% of children’s books published in the UK in 2017 featured a black, Asian or minority ethnic character, despite a third of schoolchildren coming from these backgrounds.
Pollard and Langston hadn’t even finished testing their website, but she soon found herself on Sky News discussing the study and her new business. To make the most of the media exposure at the time, Pollard started using Google ads so her website would appear when people searched for more diverse books. “It helped bring us our first customers who weren’t friends or family,” says Pollard. “That was such a great feeling, to know that people wanted to buy our product.”
Pollard and Langston have continued to use Google ads since then, making occasional minor adjustments to keyword searches. But when coronavirus hit, they realised they would need to expand their approach. With schools closing, suddenly parents and carers across the country were desperately looking for home-schooling resources. According to Google Trends, searches for “home schooling” went up fourfold in the week prior to lockdown on 23 March. Nielsen Book, which monitors the industry, reported that sales of children’s education books went up 234% in the same period.
“We thought books and learning resources that would transport them outside of their family bubble during this time could be important,” says Pollard. “So we created ads to reference that, and help more people to find us.”
Pollard says Google tools have enabled their business to reach an entirely new audience in recent months. “They have brought hundreds of people to us who may not have realised that most children’s books don’t accurately reflect the world we live in today. I love that; it’s why we set up the company. I’ll continue to update my Google My Business as another place where people can find our business.”
There’s a social element to all that Pollard and Langston do. For every box purchased, they send one to London-based child literacy charity Doorstep Library. And since March, each new order has received a stamped envelope addressed to a care home resident, so children can write letters or draw pictures for older people who are isolated.
When we speak, anti-racism protests have spread from the US to the UK, further highlighting the need for greater diversity on children’s bookshelves. Pollard is already noticing the impact on her business. “People want to do better for their kids. Sometimes they just need a little help. We’d love it if all children could see themselves in stories. Then instead of talking about ‘diverse books’, we could just talk about ‘books’.”
To find out how Google can help your business adapt, visit: g.co/smallbusiness
