Jaime Daez, Managing Director, Fully Booked in the Philippines, Speaking at Sharjah Booksellers Conference 2026
By Jaime Daez
My journey as a bookseller was an accidental one, as I never planned to be a bookseller. After studying architecture in Spain in the early 90s, I returned home to Manila in 1994, and was disappointed at the lack of good architecture books available in bookstores at that time. You see, while I was studying in Spain, there was one particular book publication from Spain called El Croquis that I collected. So, I sent them a fax in early 1996 (yes, emails weren’t a thing yet back then!). I wrote to them that I wanted to be their distributor and asked what was the best discount they could offer. In reality, I just wanted to keep collecting their publications for myself, and I just wanted to buy them for my personal collection at the cheapest price possible.They promptly sent me back a fax, surprised that someone all the way from the Philippines was interested in being their distributor. They offered me options of different discounts dependent on how much I buy, with 60% being the maximum discount if I purchased 100 or more total books. At that time, they had 20 books that I still didn’t have in my collection so I decided I would buy all 20 titles, and order 5 copies each so that I could avail myself of the max discount. Furthermore, I guess because of their amusement that someone from the other side of the world was interested to carry their titles, they immediately offered me credit terms without my asking for it, with only 25% down payment, and the remaining 75% payable after 90 days. My first order with them had a total invoice value of $800, so my initial capital to start my bookselling journey was only $200.
When the books finally arrived, I set aside one copy each of the 20 titles for myself, with the idea of selling off the remaining 4 copies of each title by direct selling. So I got a copy of the Yellow Pages, looked at the sections of architecture firms and interior design agencies, and called first the firms that had the biggest font, because in my head, if they are willing to pay for bigger font, that means they will have a bigger budget to buy books! I got very lucky on my first visit, as the firm bought a complete set of all 20 books. After that, I thought to myself, wow this is going to be so easy! Three more visits like this and I’ll be sold out!As luck would have it, that was the first and only time I sold a complete set of those 20 books.
In the course of visiting many architecture firms in those first few months, many times I visited without selling any books. But the architects would always tell me the books they were looking for. So, when I started doing my research on where I could get these books, there was a book distributor from Singapore called Page One that was oftentimes the nearest distributor to my country. I decided to make a trip to Singapore with the little money I had, not more than $1000, to see if I could source books from him. I met him in his warehouse, and, probably amused at my entrepreneurial spirit at such a young age, he gave me an attractive wholesale discount of 40% on any title he had in his warehouse. I ended up spending all the money in my wallet, and brought two suitcases full of books home.
Four months into my bookselling journey, I went through an experience that almost ended my bookselling career. I set a meeting with an architectural firm whose office was located in the 19th floor. At that time I had no cellphone, and when I arrived at the lobby of the building, there was a power interruption and the whole building had no electricity. An appointment is an appointment, so I started going up the staircase of the building, taking 30 minutes just to get to the 10th floor of the building while carrying a 40 pound box full of architecture books.
And then I had a lightbulb moment. If there was no electricity in the whole building, then in all likelihood, the office I was visiting might be closed. So I hid the box in the corner of the 10th floor, ran up to the 19th floor, and to my dismay, the office was indeed closed. So it took me another 40 minutes to walk down from the 10th floor to the lobby, drenched in sweat and for the first and only time in my life, and I asked myself if this was the right job for me. Was it worth all this effort, and all this blood, sweat and tears? But I concluded that I love selling books, and I’ve never looked back since.
A year into selling books as a door-to-door salesman, I opened my first store in 1997. I needed to do this, as prior to opening, all my books were stored in my bedroom while still living in my mom’s house. I barely had space anymore to move around my bedroom, as I had 6-foot stacks of architecture books taking up 80% of my bedroom.
The store was actually my mom’s candy store that sold polvoron, a cute but tiny store of 30 square meters. Initially I took up half the space and paid half the rent. But after 6 months, my mom told me to just take the whole space and take care of the rent, which I did.
I needed a catchy name so I thought to myself, use the Greek word biblos, from which the word book is derived, and add Arch, referring to both Architecture as well as a gateway. Hence the name, Bibliarch, which meant Architecture Books or a Gateway to Books. A few months in after opening the store, I realized many customers were walking into the store looking for bibles, so maybe the name I thought of wasn’t that brilliant after all.
It was also during this time that the infamous Asian Crisis started, with our currency, the Philippine peso, depreciating by 60% vs. the US dollar in a span of a year. In an economic crisis, the first thing to always get hit is construction. When construction slows down, architects don’t have as many projects, and before long I realized that most of them had no budget to buy books. So, it was during this time that I slowly started expanding to other book categories, from architecture and interior design, to cooking, travel, and even some business and children’s books.
A year and a half after opening this first store, I opened our second Bibliarch store, in December 1998, again a tiny store of 30 square meters which was our first store in a shopping mall. The third store opened a month later, in January 1999, this time increasing to a 90-square meter footprint.
Fast forward to year 2000, and the owner of Page One, who was my biggest supplier of books at that time, initiated the idea of opening a Page One franchise in the Philippines. He already had big stores in Hong Kong at that time, and the idea was to open a 1000-square meter general bookstore. I was excited by the idea and told him I was interested in pursuing the project. So, in December of 2000, we opened Page One in the Philippines, the first franchised-store of Page One in the world.
The business flourished for the first few months, but there was a problem. Page One wanted to fully control the supply of books that was going to our store. For example, in the Philippines, basketball and golf are the most popular sports, while in Singapore football or soccer was the main sport. So he would send me many copies of books about David Beckham and Manchester United, which would get stuck on our shelves.
While I appreciated the 90-day credit line that he offered me, I was running into payment problems with him, as the sales we were generating were not fast enough for me to pay him on time. I tried to negotiate with the owner of Page One and asked if we could be the one to choose the books instead of him and his team from Singapore, emphasizing the fact that we know our market and what can sell in our market better than him. But he refused, and eventually we parted ways in a not so amicable way after less than 18 months from opening the store. While it was a painful lesson that almost ended in litigation, the experience I learned from running a general bookstore more than ten times the size of my biggest Bibliarch store was like a crash course master’s and doctorate degree in bookselling, condensed in 18 months.
Since the break-up was not amicable, I was forced to take down the Page One logo of our store immediately. And so, for almost eight months, our store had no name and our shopping bags were just plain white plastic bags. In January 1 of 2003, we finally put a new store name. Fully Booked was born.
We opened a few more Fully Booked stores in the next four years. But the most popular bookstore chain of the country at that time, called National Bookstore, would typically get first dibs for a bookstore space when a new mall opened. And so I felt a bold and daring move needed to be made. I had to make a statement, and create a flagship store that would change the perception of mall developers, so that Fully Booked became the default choice of any new shopping center.
I signed with Ayala, one of the big mall conglomerates in the country, in late 2005 to do a 15-year land lease to do our flagship project. I remember talking to my landlord and telling her that I planned to maximize the space by maxing out the allowed height of the building. I was planning to do a four-story structure with a basement and a roof deck. I remember her being nervous for me, and telling me, “maybe you should do two floors first, and just add another two floors if it does well?” But I knew that doing that would only cost more. So, in poker terms, I was going all in. All the money I had and didn’t have at that time, I was risking for this project. If it did well, it would hopefully pave the way for a very bright future for Fully Booked. If it didn’t do well, I would probably have to close all my stores within the next two years.
In preparation for this, I went to both London and New York and with my architecture background, studied all the best bookshops in those two cities to get inspiration for how I wanted this dream project to be.
In June of 2007 we finally opened the flagship store. Fortunately, the project was an immediate success and the initial investment was recouped within the first five years. But more than that, it truly changed the way mall developers saw my company and before long, we were getting offers left and right to open more bookstores in more locations.
But, as we know in the bookselling business, the business is NEVER easy. Within six months after opening our flagship store, Amazon introduced the kindle, and within two years, all everyone talked about in the business was the impending gloom and doom of physical book sales. From practically a zero share in 2007, ebooks constituted a 15% share of the total book market in the U.S. by 2011, and a high of 23% in 2014. During these years, I was honestly very worried about the future of Fully Booked and how we could survive. Just to have flat revenue from year-to-year was an achievement during that time.
But then a miracle happened. After 2014, ebooks stopped growing and started dwindling. I guess the way to explain it was that the early adopters to digital reading adopted, and those who didn’t remained loyal to buying the physical book. Finally there seemed to be a glimmer of hope.
It was also during this time that we learned right-sizing. Gone were the days of wanting to open huge stores of almost 1000 square meters. It was now all about store efficiency, and extracting the highest sales for every square meter you have. I experimented with the idea of the 80/20 rule. If it is true that 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your inventory, then doesn’t that mean that if you reduce your store footprint by 80% and keep the top 20% of the inventory, that you can still generate 80% of your sales with 80% less selling area?
So I actually did this test in real life. We had this store in a mall that had an area of 420 square meters. When our lease contract ended after five years, the mall developer wanted to move us, as Uniqlo wanted to take our space. As the mall didn’t have a good space available at that time, we closed down, only to take a much smaller space of 105 square meters, exactly ¼ the size of our initial store, two years later. But this time, we decided we were going to pack it in, and fill each square meter to the brim. True enough, despite being ¼ the space of our original store, sales only declined by 10%, representing a much stronger store efficiency. I know we’ve all heard the line, “less is more,” made famous by the famous German architect Mies Van der Rohe. But in all honesty, in the world of bookselling, I truly believe “more is more.”
Things started getting better in the years 2014 to 2019. Then the world came to a stop in 2020 due to COVID. The Philippines was one of the countries that had the tightest lockdowns during the pandemic, and we were forced to close down all 29 of our stores for two full months, with zero revenue.
What’s worse, bookstores were seen as a non-essential industry, so we couldn’t even operate our e-commerce store, as our staff couldn’t travel to work without proof that they worked for an essential business. Though I was tempted during that time to cut wages, I sucked it up and paid all my staff in full that whole time despite no revenue coming in. I felt that my employees were always there for me, so it was finally my time to show them that I’m there for them when things are dire.
In the meantime, as we could already foresee that lockdowns were coming, I told our management team to pivot hard online, and try to put every single title we had in our physical stores to our website. Prior to COVID, our e-commerce operations only contributed around 1.5% of our total business, and only around 1,000 titles were listed in our website. In a span of two months, during the entire duration of the lockdown, we were busy encoding titles in our website so that we increased the offering tenfold after two months. By the end of 2021, our online sales went up thirty-fold compared to pre-pandemic, and contributed to 45% of our total sales by the end of that year.
Not one to rest on our laurels, we finalized our collaboration with the Japanese bookstore giant Kinokuniya in late 2022. I have always had great admiration for Kinokuniya, frequenting their massive store in Singapore often when I was starting my bookselling career. Joining forces with us them was in many ways a dream come true for me.
Basketball being my favorite sport, I felt like collaborating with them was like playing with Michael Jordan and learning from the best. We were already in talks with them since early 2019, but with the opening of Mitsukoshi Mall in the Philippines, we opened our first store with them. This was followed by our second store with them 12 months at the end of 2023, and a third store with them by the end of 2024. Last year we opened three stores with Kinokuniya, with the last store opening in October 2025, beside a matcha café called Wasachi that we brought in directly from Tokyo.
I have always believed in the natural synergy between books and a café, but nowadays coffee stores are a dime a dozen. With our partnership with Kinokuniya, it was only fitting that instead of opening a coffee shop, that we open an authentic matcha café in true Japanese fashion. We are opening our second branch of Wasachi in two months’ time, with our seventh store collaboration with Kinokuniya, and by mid next year, will have four matcha café stores and nine store collaborations with Kinokuniya.
Currently, Fully Booked has 49 stores, all in the Philippines, with four more openings before the end of the year, and over 800 employees.
I am thankful that my bookselling journey has been as exciting as it has been, with all the ups and downs over a 30-year career. It was never my intention to become financially successful doing this business, a business that I said from the start was an accident fueled by my passion for books. But more than the financial reward that has come my way, I am most grateful that through what I do, I have been able to support so many families. And I am deeply thankful for all my staff, without whom I simply would not be here today.
I am also thankful for the many friendships I have made over the past three decades. Some of my closest friends in the industry are here in this room today, and that means a great deal to me.
Lastly, there is something that all of us in this room share. We put books into people’s hands. And every time we do that, we give someone the opportunity to discover a new idea, to understand another person, to laugh, to cry, to be inspired, to learn something they did not know before, or perhaps even to change the direction of their life.
That is the privilege of being in the book business. After 30 years, I am grateful and honored to be a part of it. And I can think of very few things more worthwhile than spending one’s life helping to build a better-read, better informed, and better-educated world.
Jaime Daez is Managing Director of bookseller Fully Booked. Established in 2003, Fully Booked opened its first branch in Rockwell and has grown to 49 branches nationwide. Known for its comprehensive selection of books under every interest, the Philippine bookstore’s signature ambiance has also become a haven for thought tinkerers and readers alike.