How Papersmiths switched focus to online during lockdown

It’s obviously been the most difficult six months of anyone’s business life,” Sidonie Warren, co-founder and CEO of Papersmiths admits.

Like many other businesses across the country, the small stationery chain saw a dramatic decline in footfall in March followed by an enforced shutdown of their stores as the UK went into lockdown.

To keep the business alive the entrepreneur also had to furlough all of her 33 employees.

But she saw a silver lining: the unexpected closure of her shops meant she had time to explore her creativity and develop the online side of her business.

She tells the Independent: “Online was always something we wanted to focus on but I was so busy with the physical shops, I didn’t always have time to do it properly. Lockdown meant I had a three-month window where all I was doing was packing orders and doing marketing.”

Anyone who has ever visited a Papersmiths store, a small chain with a strong identity, knows it’s a neatly colour-coordinated feast for the eyes – and Sidonie made sure the brand’s personality is now also reflected online.

“I started to merchandise the website in a way we would do it in our shops – aesthetically really pleasing, colour-coordinated and beautiful. These were very small things, I haven’t invested any cash into it. It really was just about time and improving our operating system.”

Her efforts paid off – while footfall in stores might be light, the tills are ringing online. The company's online sales jumped 36 per cent in the second quarter compared to the first quarter of the year, followed by another 23 per cent increase from July to September. Overall, online sales are up 413 per cent in 2020 compared to the year before.

Sidonie says: “This period is the proudest moment of my business journey. Until the start of September, stuff kept hitting the fan. Now, it’s about taking these little steps towards reopening and I’m able to travel down to Brighton and see our team there, which is amazing because everyone is so grateful.

“We are seeing the success of online and, with our staff, it’s just this shared feeling of we are all in this together – and we’ve managed to get this far.”

Running Papersmiths from her spare room has taken Sidonie back to the beginning of her business journey, which started when she opened a graphic design studio with her business partner Kyle, doing projects for local businesses in Dorset.

After relocating to Bristol, the pair split their studio space in two, creating a shop for just £500.

“People would come into our studio thinking we were a shop. I always had a dream of being a shopkeeper and I loved stationery, so we decided to give it a go.

“We had about £500 and some friends who helped us build all the shelving. I wrote to all our favourite designers to stock their products and we opened this very minimal shop with design objects and beautiful stationery that inspired us.”

By 2014, the company began to expand and opened bricks-and-mortar stores in Brighton, Bristol and London. Meanwhile, Papersmiths’ revenue grew from just £6,000 in 2013 when it launched to more than £1m last year.

Following the accelerated move to digital caused by the pandemic, Sidonie took the difficult decision to close stores in Clifton and its Shoreditch branch in London over the summer.

While the future is uncertain, Sidonie remains cautiously optimistic and believes there will always be a place for pens and papers in an increasingly digital world.

She says:  “Digital connections make our lives and work more efficient and easier in many ways – but I do believe there’s place for both paper and digital.

“I look at my friends with children and they don’t want their kids to be on their phones and watching television. They want them to be doing things that are going to encourage imagination.

“I also think – and it’s a personal opinion – when I sit down and look at a blank page on a computer, it’s completely different to looking at my blank page in a notebook. It just starts flowing, you’ll make a little mark and then some words come and before you know it you’ve got good copy for your newsletter. You don’t get that same ease with technology.”

She argues that lockdown also sparked a renewed interest in stationery. “We saw an uptick in diary sales in lockdown when people were recording their experiences, then again in September with people going back to work or children to school. People are also at home more and thinking, my life and work are now completely intertwined, unless I get organised.”

She is hoping for a successful Christmas and to continue the momentum of online, arguing that being on top of her numbers helped her throughout the crisis. “My advice for young business owners out there is to learn how to do a cashflow projection, it’s not the most glamorous but it’s the most important thing. Don’t create an abstract document that you never look at, it has to be a working spreadsheet that you use with real dates.

“I do a weekly cashflow forecasting using a business accounting software called Xero. So far, we are doing better than my projections but we don’t know what’s around the corner. The way things are going with online, we are set to triple last year’s Christmas sales. We are going to need temporary workers to come in and help us with picking and packing, so we are going to be doing a bit of recruitment.

“Early next year we want to continue the momentum of online and keep that up because we are going to be stronger as a business if we’ve got more different revenue streams – and if another lockdown happens, we can shift more customers online, hopefully.”

More than anything she says the pandemic taught her not to worry about the small stuff. “I used to get into the stores and I’d be worried about the colour coordination and what music is playing – now we’re still trading and that’s great.”