IN DEPTH


Company Spotlight Firsty Group


Brockman revels in success of Firsty’s lockdown pivot as Glassbox takes root


The founder and c.e.o. of the Firsty Group has reaped the benefits of having a broad portfolio in lockdown, launching a new consumer-facing e-book and audiobook app and helping publishers break beyond Amazon’s clutches


Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan


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his was, of course, not at all planned but it was fortuitous timing that First Group happened to launch Glassboxx, its sister company and consumer-facing e-books and audio app, at the beginning of 2020. For if there was a lesson to take away from the pandemic for the trade, particularly early on, it was that it may not be beneficial to be in a position where all of its eggs are in one Amazon-sized basket. Darin Brockman, founder and c.e.o. of publishing digital services firm First and Glassboxx, says: “In a way, this really goes back to the beginning as we started First partly because Amazon has such a stranglehold on the marketplace and we wanted to help people loosen that grip. But we had literally just launched Glassboxx when the pandemic hit—and remember, this was at a time when publishers couldn’t even ship their books—and a lot of publishers were thinking: ‘Where’s our revenue going to come from over the next few months? Are we even going to survive this?’ So there was huge concern, and we had a lot of publishers coming on board very quickly. “Obviously, those revenues picked up and publishing has come out of the pandemic prety well, almost across the board. I like to think First and Glassboxx have helped in that. There have been some exceptional successes: we were talking to Pavilion the other day and they have a title [Gennaro Contaldo’s charit cookery book, Gennaro’s Good Food for Hard Times] which has sold into 69 countries on Glassboxx.”


On the road


In many ways, Glassboxx is a multi-generational product, descended from First Express, an e-book platform the company tried to launch more than a decade ago. Brockman admits the timing wasn’t so great that time around: “We went to publishers and said: ‘We have this brilliant product, give us your e-books.’ And a lot of them said: ‘That sounds great, but we don’t have any e-books.’ I didn’t really factor that part in—we were much too early to market.”


Text by TomTivnan


Aſter First Express, the company pivoted to e-book conversion, app development and producing digital children’s books along with the building of general websites and e-commerce sites with which First was originally founded. But Brockman still thought the B2C


18 20th October 2021


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