, and moved to its superstore site in West Parade, West Ryde, in 1995. Koorong now operates 15 stores across Australia with no plans to open up more, for the time being. “We had 19 at our peak around two to three years ago. (The ones that went) mostly were smaller ones where the lease ran out,” Bootes said. “With the trend to digital and online, we’re probably not of the mind, at the moment, to open more stores.” To attract more customers, Koorong is pushing its online marketing. “More [discount] coupons for our stores to get people to come in the door. I do think retailing seems to be more promotion driven (now). “We continue to be more active in the online space – with better targeted  email, social media, and SEO.” Kooyong has a customer database of 150,000, which receives emails twice weekly to keep them informed of the latest offers, specials, and new releases. Releases of movies and DVDs have been a growth area. “Probably the whole faith-based movie business – for example ‘Heaven is for Real’  – has been doing extremely well for us. It’s based on a book, so we sell the book and the DVD,” Bootes explained. “It’s great when you have the big movie houses like Sony release movies in our niche. They’ve done several of them lately, Mom’s Night Out for example. We also did well with the bible TV mini-series, The Bible, released as a four disc DVD set.” There aren’t many competitors in Australia for Koorong to be concerned about. “Our main competitor is Amazon and its associated companies, like Book Depository, and obviously all the online book retailers, like Fishpond, and The Nile. It’s really the online book retailers who are our competition.” As far as stock goes, Koorong usually carries around 30,000 to 40,000 products. While most of its customers are Christian, there are also “a lot of people into spirituality who are looking, trying to understand”. Koorong stores are in all the capital cities and Newcastle in NSW. “We did look at the Gold Coast a number of times but it didn’t work out.” Stores have also been established in large regional centres – Toowoomba, for instance, has a large Christian community and is home to Easterfest, a popular Christian music festival that attracts more than 20,000. Many of the store sites are owned by Koorong, and stores won’t be set up in Westfield centres or malls because the rent is too high. “Our models won’t support those kind of rents. We’re pretty much into strip shopping, standalone, big box facilities,” said Bootes. There’s been many requests over the years to do franchising, but as Koorong is a family run business it’s not under consideration. “We like to do what we want and move quickly if we need to.” This story first appeared in Inside Retail PREMIUM issue 2030. To subscribe, click here.