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ASIA’S PAGE ONE CHAIN IS NOT YOUR AVERAGE BOOKSTORE

By Dakota Smith

Many book chains seem to follow the Barnes & Noble prototype, but Page One, a Singapore-based book retailer and publisher with 10 stores throughout Asia, isn’t getting with the program. Instead, Page One Group, which sells books about art and design, operates stores that are themselves worthy of a spread in any glossy art book.

Take the company’s biggest, a 20,000-square-foot unit in Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the world’s largest tower. This store’s design boasts elements both modern and traditional and could be said to draw inspiration from a Chinese landscape painting: Wooden shelves are set about at varying heights to invoke the rise and fall of mountain ranges.

On the modern side, light boxes within the shelf units suggest an urban nightclub, while the spiraling bookshelf in the center of the store resembles the “O” in Page One’s name.

Customers browse through art and design books from such publishers as Assouline (U.S.) and Idea Books (Italy), or read the latest fiction best-seller, or peruse a periodical while seated at a table in the café.

According to Page One CEO Mark Tan, the company has a different design for each of its five stores (the other four are in Hong Kong) and for the stores-within-stores it operates inside the units of Kinokuniya, a Japanese-based international book retailer. Tan’s brother, acclaimed Singapore-based architect Kay Ngee Tan designs most of the stores. “In every country we go to, it’s a totally different concept,” said Mark Tan.

This emphasis on presentation has earned the company both professional respect and a street credibility not easily attained in the competitive book field. “Page One has seriously improved the overall presentation of the merchandising in the bookstore category,” said Sebastian Skiff, managing director in the South Korea office of Cushman & Wakefield. “Even on an international level and not just on an Asian level, they are exceeding on the presentation level. If you asked people, ‘Where do I go to buy a book?’ the majority would say, ‘Go to Page One.’ ”

Tan founded Page One in 1983 with $30,000 borrowed from his father to open a 1,500-square-foot shop in the Parkway Parade mall in Singapore. The store stocked solely design books, a niche overlooked by the few chains operating in Singapore at the time, including MPH Bookstores and Times The Bookshop. Art appreciation was not exactly on the radar in the country either.

Tan chalks up that lack of interest in design to pure economics, pointing out that in the early 1980s, Singapore was still an emerging country. “We all know design appreciation is done just by people who are richer,” he said. “The question was, how does a country start to appreciate design?”

One way, Tan says, was to target artists, who would spend money on art supplies and art books. So with that market in mind, he ordered books on art, architecture, graphic design and similar fields from overseas.

Tan displayed the 1,500 titles in that first store so that the covers and not the spines faced customers. If people were complimentary of the artful display, Tan knew something they did not. “You catch the attention of the consumer with the covers,” he conceded, “but the real reason is that I didn’t have enough books.”

Page One posted $500,000 in sales that first year; annual sales today are about $30 million, according to Tan. The company’s unique partnership with Kinokuniya, which goes back to 1997, eases Page One’s entry into new markets, according to Tan. Currently, Page One operates units inside five Kinokuniya stores — one each in Singapore and Malaysia, and three in Thailand.

In 2002 Page One added a publishing division that puts out 130 titles a year on home design, shoe design, photography and even cartoon art. Page One also has a distribution company and publishes a monthly design magazine called Ish, which is distributed in its stores and in other bookstores throughout Asia.

The Taipei store stocks some 200,000 titles. The other four stock a few less, about 150,000, and measure between 5,000 and 13,500 square feet. Roughly half the books in Page One stores are in English; the rest are in the language of the country the store is in. The stores are generally smaller than those operated by regional competitors, which largely follow the North American model of very large bookstores.

Taiwan’s Eslite, one of the country’s largest book retailers, operates stores there that measure about 40,000 square feet, according to Bryn Davies, executive director of Asian retail services at the CB Richard Ellis Hong Kong office. In Singapore Borders Books and Kinokuniya operate stores over 20,000 square feet in size.

Most bookstores in Hong Kong run by internationally based retailers are in malls, says Davies. Only the locally based stores operate in street locations.

Norman Chan, senior portfolio manager at the Hong Kong office of Swire Properties, a worldwide development firm, says bookstores in Hong Kong have traditionally had a department store feel. “In Hong Kong you don’t get that good a shopping experience,” he said. “There are stores selling huge volumes but without an environment.”

In 1998 Chan leased Page One a space in Festival Walk, a 220-store upscale mall in Kowlook, a suburb of Hong Kong. The store’s glass exterior walls make it visible from inside the mall. Customers are permitted to linger and browse the books inside the café. “Having a pleasing room in the retail environment is important, particularly in Hong Kong, which has such high population density,” Chan said.

The store holds book-signing events, and among the recent authors was Chris Patton, a former governor of Hong Kong. The clientele tend to be affluent and educated, and they patronize the mall’s other stores as well, Chan says.

Tan says he prefers to open stores in malls, because more important than location is a good mix of stores. “Even if you have a bad location, but a good tenant mix, people will come,” he said. “Tenant mix is the most important thing for the success of a shopping mall.”

The chain plans to open new stores in Shanghai and Beijing next, with an eye to the rest of the continent over the next 10 years or so.

Beyond, Tan says he eventually plans to open stores in Europe and in New York City and San Francisco, though he has no timetable for any of that. His goal for the U.S. is to provide its Chinese people with Chinese-language books.

“If you are Chinese and in San Francisco and you try to get recent reading, you will get a gossip magazine,” he said. “You can’t find a decent book. Imagine you become the CEO of a company in San Francisco and move to America — your children would lose all of that Chinese culture.”