Jaime Daez didn’t have much of a business plan when he started selling books: he just wanted to buy copies of Spanish architecture magazine El Croquis (and, if possible, at a discount). Daez had started reading the publication as a student at the University of Navarra in Pamplona; after returning home to the Philippines in 1994 he was keen to keep collecting issues. “Amazon was nonexistent back then,” he says. “One day I decided to send the publishers of El Croquis a fax, presenting myself as a possible distributor,” he says. To his surprise, the magazine’s team agreed to give him 60 per cent off the retail price if he ordered 100 copies. Two sheets of fax paper later, Daez was a fledgling magazine and book distributor.

Sitting in his office inside the Fully Booked shop in Manila’s Bonifacio Global City (BGC) neighbourhood, Daez tells Monocle that he started off more like a door-to-door salesman than a conventional distributor. “I would flick through the Yellow Pages, looking for architecture firms and interior-design agencies to sell to,” he says. “The bigger the font, the better, because that meant they probably had a bigger budget for buying books.” His approach was simple. He would call a company and then visit its offices in person, with the hefty copies of El Croquis in tow.

Four months into his improvised career, Daez secured an appointment with a renowned Filipino architecture firm. He arrived at its building only to discover that there was a power cut – a frequent occurrence in the country in the 1990s. The lifts were out of action and the firm’s office was all the way up on the 19th floor. So Daez trudged up the stairs, carrying more than 20kg of titles; half an hour later he was still only on the 10th floor. Huffing and puffing, he suddenly realised that, because of the blackout, the architecture firm’s office was probably closed. “I tucked the box of magazines in a corner and ran up to the 19th floor,” he says. “There was no one up there.”. For Daez, this moment was a turning point. “The incident made me ask myself, ‘Am I willing to put up with all of this?’” Despite the frustrating experience, he realised that he was.

Daez’s next step was to use half of his mother’s 30 sq m sweetshop to sell an expanded range of titles focusing on tropical, Asian and Mediterranean architecture. Sales were encouraging. Eventually he took over the entire shop, widening its selection to include business and children’s books, as well as fiction. In 1997, Daez opened his first official bookshop in Glorietta, a shopping centre in the Makati precinct (Fully Booked now occupies a bigger site in the same complex). This was followed by a series of openings across Manila.

Despite his swift success, that moment of clarity in the stuffy staircase as a 24-year-old continued to play an outsized role in Daez’s career. It steeled him as the Philippines’ publishing industry faced a succession of difficult challenges, from the 1997 Asian financial crisis to the rise of e-books. “Within the span of about three years in the late 2000s, the use of e-books increased by almost 10 times,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘I might be out of business soon.’”

Despite the uncertainty, Daez went on to take his biggest business gamble: securing a 15-year land lease to build a four-storey bookshop in the then-underdeveloped BGC precinct. “The head of [shopping-centre chain] Ayala Malls asked me, ‘Jaime, are you sure? Don’t you want to be conservative and focus on two floors first?’” But Daez believed that having his own land parcel would anchor the business in stormy times; he also suspected that BGC would soon become the new city centre. So he went all in. His instincts proved correct: today, BGC is one of the Philippines’ leading central business and lifestyle districts, the port of call for all of the biggest brands. Here, Fully Booked BGC stands as a beacon for book lovers. It’s an attractive flagship shop with plenty of natural light, a big acrylic painting by US artist Mike Stilkey that uses discarded books as its canvas and whimsical paper sculptures of marine animals that hang from the ceiling.

By 2020, Fully Booked had 31 thriving bookshops across the city but lacked a strong online presence. This became a big problem when the coronavirus pandemic forced all of Fully Booked’s shops – which the authorities deemed as non-essential businesses – to close for two months. No one was permitted to enter. “Our online sales were only 1.5 per cent of our total revenue at the time,” says Daez. “It was a matter of survival. I told my managers to bring home their laptops and encode every single book for our online shop.” Despite the lockdown, his team upped its productivity and added 10,000 titles to the business’s website within four months.

This agile response to the crisis made all the difference and cemented Fully Booked’s position as the Philippines’ go-to bookshop chain. Its biggest competitor, National Book Store, seems to have shifted its focus towards textbooks and office supplies. “National Book Store used to be a temple of the written word,” says Ric Gindap, co-founder of rising Manila-based magazine shop Spruce Gallery. “But stepping inside today, you feel like you’re preparing for a third-grade science fair, rather than feeding your literary soul.” By contrast, Fully Booked has continued to diversify its selection of fiction titles, art books, graphic novels and more.

The company’s growth looks good on paper too. Since the pandemic, Fully Booked’s online business has grown by 2,400 per cent and 17 new shops were added during the same period. Its e-commerce operation has been such a success that it has caught the eye of US publishing giant Penguin Random House. “Its executive vice-president told me that we were its case study in Asia because no one had pivoted better and more quickly than we had,” says Daez.

The biggest endorsement came when Japanese bookshop Kinokuniya chose to team up with Fully Booked for its expansion into the Philippines in 2022. Together they opened a co-branded shop in the Mitsukoshi BGC shopping mall, with a selection of 20,000 Japanese books. The move has enabled Daez to tap into the growth of manga (and Japanese pop culture in general) in the Philippines. “Manga exploded during the coronavirus years and Japan is unsurprisingly the top destination visited by Filipinos,” he says. It’s a partnership that is blooming. In October, Daez will be opening another co-branded shop with Tokyo matcha café Wasachi in the upscale Rockwell neighbourhood.

Fully Booked has bucked the trend of bookshop closures because Daez has always found a way to evolve with the times. While books are the foundation of the business, Daez isn’t afraid to expand its offering. He recently set aside a section for “blind boxes” – sealed packages that each contain a randomly chosen product from a wider series, such as a key-ring doll. These might seem like a departure from books but Daez thinks of this hugely popular trend as a crossover. “Many of these blind-box characters originated from books,” he says. “People come in with the intention of buying one of these boxes but might also pick up a book along the way. We’re not selling something random, like Christmas lights.”

Daez is already plotting his next move: creating a suite of Fully Booked-branded merchandise. To him, the gold standard is New York bookshop The Strand, whose own branded wares are almost as well loved as the books on display. “Its shop sells so many variations of its own tote bags, T-shirts, socks and more,” says Daez.

It has been almost 30 years since that fateful fax but Daez’s zeal for what he does remains undiminished. “I put in more time working now than when I started the business,” he says. While his strategies continue to shift according to the market, there’s one constant: his love of books. “I’m a bit of a romantic when it comes to my business,” he says. “I believe that if you have passion for what you do, it can be felt in your stores.”

The CV

1994: Returns to Manila from Pamplona, Spain
1996: Starts distributing copies of El Croquis 
1997: Opens his first full-fledged bookshop in Glorietta
2007: Opens the Fully Booked BGC flagship shop
2021: Fully Booked’s e-commerce business rapidly grows
2022: Inks partnership with Kinokuniya 
2025: Fully Booked is on track to have 49 shops by the end of the year