BroLi (broli.com.uy) is a solidarity bookstore run by Victor Fernández and me, Pedro Copelmayer, which donates a book to public schools without a library for every book sold. The project It started in 2018, and since then we have been in the process of growth and professionalization. To date, we have managed to donate more than 2,500 books to schools in 10 departments of the country, and our goal is to reach 10,000 books donated throughout the country.
Photography: Victor Fernández and Pedro Copelmayer, co-founders.
To achieve our goal of being able to transforming Uruguayan education (and, why not, think about internationalization at some point) we constantly seek to develop what we consider our main competitive advantages: the brand and the applied technology. On this second point I want to emphasize this post.
The creativity of scarcity
We were recently lucky enough to win the Seed Capital Fund from the National Development Agency (ANDE) and some large clients who have given us a little more support, but BroLi was created from minute one and financed from our own pocket, with no external investment money or state funds.
I say this because I firmly believe that creativity, even in business decisions, Technology is a great ally of scarcity. In BroLi, at first, We innovated because we had no choice.
From minute one we knew that BroLi was going to be an online company, partly because our expertise was related to that, but also because we didn't have the capacity to pay rent. Our location ended up being Shopify, the well-known online platform. e-commerce creation. Once we had a “local”, we looked for suppliers. That is how we established a relationship with the vast majority of book distributors in the country, but Another issue related to shortages arose. Where were we going to put all the books we had to take on consignment? How were we going to offer them to the public if we didn't have a store? We turned to technology as a solution: we decided to Develop a data scraping system to scan all of our vendors' databases and display that information on our Shopify page, we doing the fulfillment only once the order was already placed by the client, which allowed us save seriously on costs related to storage and the same time to be able to give customers the largest selection of books in Uruguay in one place (perhaps with the exception of MercadoLibre, which has a marketplace logic).
Technology and innovation in marketing
One of the decisions we also made based on the shortage was to define what acquisition channels of users we were going to develop. We quickly ruled out PPC (Pay Per Click), and decided to attack less capital-intensive (although more creativity-intensive) methods such as organic content on networks (mainly Instagram, TikTok and Twitter), campaigns with influencers, and investment in SEO, where we work with the DahSeo agency, one of the best, if not the best, in the country.
Also, thanks to our way of working and applied technology, We achieved get agreements of representation of foreign publishers, particularly Pólvora Editorial, from Chile, which we represent in Brazil and Uruguay, and Ágora Relacional, from Spain, which we represent in Uruguay and Argentina. These publishers were attracted In addition to our treatment and growth, Our lean way of working, since we do not request to import your books but rather we make print-on-demand agreements, we capitalize the prints with our own capital and we print locally in Uruguay, so the publisher is guaranteed exposure in the country without having to make any initial outlay. After all, Books are information, and the best way to convey that information is digitally. Then we, in Uruguay, study each of the markets (first we are specializing in psychoanalysis, and then we will expand the portfolio) to ensure that we have a certain placement before approaching the publishers.
Conclusions and future projects
It is important to note that our industry (new book retail) has only recently and timidly begun to implement technological changes that other industries have processed much more quickly. We believe that Technology is not going to replace books, but it should be our ally in generating a better experience reading. That's why we always look for ways to make life easier for our customers, whether through our stock infrastructure (which we are currently re-evaluating to avoid some errors we have found) until payment facilities, where we offer 12 installments without surcharge on all books and also, by integrating Coinbase Commerce, we became the first bookstore in Latin America to accept 6 different cryptocurrencies, from Bitcoin and Ethereum to stablecoins like DAI and USDC through other currencies like Dogecoin, as a payment method. We also like to have fun and from time to time we launch a project that does not impact the core business but it is entertaining, like the Benedetti Bot, a Twitter bot that we created that automatically publishes excerpts from the Uruguayan author's work.
Regarding future projects, we are very excited to relaunch our subscription product, The BroLi Club, where subscribers have access to benefits such as: a free book per month, access to exclusive activities and events, discounts, raffles, and more. In this regard, we are working with Bamboo Payments to automate recurring payments, an issue that complicated the first launch of the project in 2021. We are also thinking of launching an integration with the MercadoLibre API in the short term to be able to offer our entire catalog on the platform; generate a button “randomization” on the web so that people who don't know what they want to read can enter a randomly chosen book, and a large project that is the design of a proprietary algorithm for categorizing and recommending books, which we are very excited about because we believe it can bring a lot of value to our users. We are also evaluating implement technology of Simpletech, particularly Wittybots, to improve and automate our response process and Wittysend, to generate outbound campaigns on WhatsApp. This is a channel that we believe can have quite potential for next year.
Another of the great projects that we hope to be able to launch this year is the incorporation of e-books to our offer, which is something that many clients have requested and we want to be able to offer. In this regard, we are studying and beginning to approach aggregators in order to connect to their catalogues and offer them directly on our website. In this sense, we reinforce our confidence in our choice of Shopify as the platform on which to develop our website, since its interface and simple API drastically reduce the time and cost of implementing this type of initiatives.
Finally, we hope to be able to launch the mobile app that we have been developing in the last few months this year, hopefully in the first half of the year. This app will allow, in addition to transacting, to see an interactive map of our donations, create a profile and play literary games, such as the famous exquisite corpse. Obviously, we also have some secret projects I don't want to reveal anything yet, but (knock on wood) I think they can move the needle in the business and help take BroLi to the next level to continue impacting socially.
BroLi's story, in short, is one of almost forced innovation, where we had to embrace technology not only out of conviction but out of necessity, and along the way we realized that all projects that seek to have an impact beyond the economic, must approach the technological world (no matter how traditional our sector may be) to enhance the mark we want to leave in the ecosystem.
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