Product Management "Non-Book"

This publishing house doesn't just do books, it also has a wide range of gift items, useful book accessories and games.

In bookseller's jargon these things are reffered to rather bluntly as 'non-books': They are all those little objects you seeat your bookshop which somehow belong together with books and make the shop look more attractive.

Non-books work is a piece of cake. It just means zooming around the world, visiting trade fairs, chatting with product designers and finally arranging for the production of a few nice little items by over a hundred different suppliers worldwide. There’s also a bit of coordination to be done here and there to make sure they deliver the right quantities in the right colours at the right time at the right quality to the right place. Of course, the team can hardly contain its delight when a truck transporting our wonderfully colourful and exotic key-ring pendants veers off into a ditch somewhere in India. Or when the boss, two minutes before production is due to start, suddenly decides that he would like the lettering on the packaging 2 mm bigger. Oh well. They say a little stress is good for the health.