A focus on front-list books, a greater number of exclusive offerings and a new mission to be a screen-free, family-favourite store are some of the ways The Works is ramping up its offering more than 40 years after its opening.

Lynne Tooms, the company’s chief commercial officer, leads The Works’ product proposition. Since she joined the company two years ago – following over two decades in senior buying roles at George at ASDA – she has focused on screen-free activities and evolving the company’s approach to books, including more emphasis on front-list titles, exclusives and the influence of BookTok.

While Tooms was new to books when she joined The Works in 2023, she understood immediately that the company’s messaging needed clarifying. “The Works had an amazing purpose to inspire reading, learning, creativity and play but actually, at the time, the proposition overall didn’t kind of represent that fully – from both a brand point of view and from a product point of view.” 

Tooms wanted to make things simple. “We had our categories, obviously books… but we also had art and craft, stationary and seasonal and toys and games. And for me, I had to think about: ’Well, how would I bring all of those categories together under one umbrella to be able to talk to them to the customer?’” she explained.

“And we really felt that, actually, what customers were looking for is a way in this digital age to reconnect, whether that be have a bit of time with yourself or be able to reconnect with your family and friends. And so that’s where we got to… Our mission then became to be our favourite destination for screen-free activities for the whole family.”

While the company did not run focus groups, Tooms’ team consulted with “colleagues in stores who absolutely deal with our customers on an everyday basis and have really good relationships with some of our regular customers”, and plans to run customer focus groups in the near future. The company’s financial financial results from July revealed “stores represent more than 90% of total sales, continuing to be the primary driver of growth” showing the strength of its bricks mortar offering.

To bolster its family-based, screen-free messaging, The Works began developing Time Well Spent as a brand campaign, launching it at Christmas 2024, continuing it into spring, summer and beyond. Tooms described the response as “really positive”.

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The marketing department experimented with its customer communications to test the appetite for the screen-free focus. “We tried testing some of our emails, so about half term, we did a screen-free message of activities this half term, screen-free activities this half term, and we did just toys and games and activities for this half term, and the screen-free one had 75% more engagement than the other one,” Tooms said. “And so we started to get a little bit braver about kind of how we talk about it and we’ve just run our summer campaign, which was The Boredom Board, where we recruited three new board members who were children… they actually came into this head office and did some short films for us and so they were the board for that day and they decided it all.”

Alongside using clips of the children’s day in the boardroom on social media, The Works has also been engaging more with influencers as part of the screen-free campaign, the results of which “went way beyond kind of what our expectations were”, Tooms said.

However, she added: “We are not anti-tech, we’re really cautious about that. Technology absolutely has its place but we have started dabbling. We’re talking about screen-free in a more open way, and it’s such an obviously big talking point at the moment.”

The company is also shaking up its core books offering and “ensuring we’ve got the right front list and back list” and offering more front-list titles than a few years ago. “So the heartland from an adult point of view is the romance part of it, the crime and the thriller. But we are finding, obviously, with trends, with the BookTok trends, that kind of evolvement into the sports romance, and the romance-fantasy part is definitely a growth opportunity. And then the whole cowboy romance piece is evolving as well, but definitely trends that are coming from a TikTok point of view.”

The company is also considering more special editions. “We’re definitely doing more exclusives [than a few years ago]. I mean, throughout the range, not just in books, but overall, we know that newness and innovation is absolutely key for our customers. If it provides that point of difference, we know that people are searching us out to come and find the latest sprayed edge, the latest exclusive content. And so that’s a really key part of our strategy going forward, to make sure that we can continue to be that one step ahead.”

Tooms explained: “The exclusive focus has definitely accelerated over the past 12 to 18 months and we’ve seen the reaction from it. And the publishers have been really supportive of it as well. In January, we ran our campaign called Spreaduary [the company announced a new growth strategy in the same month], so we brought that new word into the books world. We had 12 exclusive books that were released over 12 days, which was fully supported by the publishers and the key authors as part of it as well, and they really see that as a point difference that The Works is bringing to the market.”

“We work closely with BookTok. It’s our strongest social channel that we’ve got, so we use it whether it’s for recommendations, point of view, or working with creators to create content for us.”

But is there any snobbery towards the chain retailer from the publishing industry overall? Tooms insists not. “We have good relationships across a strong network of publishers,” she said. “They like that we’re a little bit disruptive – we’re bringing newness into the books world.”