Happy Birthday, ThriftBooks!

As Ashly mentioned in her blog earlier this month, ThriftBooks is now 18 years old! The company started in 2003 with one small storage unit of books in Seattle, selling 100% on marketplace sites. Our first book sold was the beloved classic, Charlotte’s Web! Shortly after, we launched ThriftBooks.com so we could reach our customers directly and share our love of books with all of you who also love books! Like any website, we have gone through many updates and versions over the years and I thought it would be fun to share a couple of images from our earlier years:

A Trip Down ThriftBooks.com Memory Lane...

Here is one of the early versions of our website back in 2004:

While reading an article that was posted on the site in those early days, I found this quote:

Since Thrift Books started in 2003, the company has emerged as one of the largest used booksellers in the country -- with 400,000 books in stock and adding 10,000 titles online every day.

We have come a long way! Today we have over 13 million titles in stock, and we add close to 1 million titles online every week!

From circa 2008:

From circa 2012:

From circa 2016:

A Company That Builds Careers

One aspect I love about ThriftBooks is our family-like company. We work hard to create a positive work environment for all employees, at all levels and all locations. From the receivers, shippers and all the members of our Operations team across our six processing centers throughout the country, to Customer Service, our HR and Training team, Accounting and Financial Analysts, Developers, IT team, Supply and Library team, Designers, and Marketers we all share a commitment to making every touch point our customers have with ThriftBooks as positive an experience as possible. As important, we strive to provide opportunities for all employees to advance within the company and truly establish a career with us. I've highlighted below a few employees who have been with us through the years and instrumental in building ThriftBooks into the company it is today.

Debbie, Vice President of Human Resources

I have been with ThriftBooks for over 14 years starting in February of 2007. I knew one of the two main founders of ThriftBooks and I was excited about the new business they had started. I would help advise them on HR issues when they had just a few employees and when they were big enough to need a full time HR employee, I let them know I was interested. I have always been in HR for the company and started off as an HR Manager then promoted to a Director and am now the Vice President of Human Resources.

I love the people at ThriftBooks and the passion everyone has for building on our success. I am fortunate enough to be in the field with our teams on a regular basis and enjoy the personal interactions I get to have with them. I have worked in the HR field for almost 30 years and this has been, by far, my favorite company to work for.

Linda, Operations Program Manager

I have been with ThriftBooks for 11 years. As the Army stationed us at Fort Lewis in Washinton state, I looked around for developer jobs, and found ThriftBooks, then located in Auburn, WA. At that time, ThriftBooks had just a couple of developers. The small team and emerging company offered lots of room for growth and innovation. And who does not want to work with books? I worked as a Software developer for seven years, then moved to the Operations Program Manager role in 2018 and have been there ever since.

I came to work at ThriftBooks for the books and stayed for the people. I sincerely appreciate the opportunities for growth both in my role and in my continuous professional development through classes and certifications. While we are growing fast, we are still a small team in Operations. We're on a first name basis all along the org chart and everyone pitches in. That kind of culture cannot be bought. It's homegrown.

Trevor, VP of Technology

I've been at ThriftBooks for almost 10 years. I started here because my brother-in-law was a founder of the company. At the time, I was at a huge company (ExxonMobil) and wanted to feel like I was having more of an impact and I especially wanted to work for a small company whose mission I believed in. Over the years I've held a variety of roles: Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineering Manager, Director of Software Engineering, and now VP of Technology.

I've stayed at ThriftBooks because there is a never-ending supply of problems and challenges waiting for a solution. My team is also what keeps me here. They provide amazing support to me and to our customers. They are the smartest, most creative, hardest working people I could hope to work with. I could talk all day about the ownership they exhibit, their creativity, their expertise, and their concern for the customers and our business. They teach me new things every day.

Joshua, Software Engineer

I started here in August, 2011, so I am coming up on my 10 year anniversary. Prior to working at ThriftBooks, I worked at Seattle Goodwill in their online book deptartment and I started at ThriftBooks as a customer service representative answering emails, and eventually phone as well. While doing that I got an online degree and that allowed me to move over to the Operations Engineering team as an Engineering Systems Analyst. After doing that for three years, I was promoted to Software Engineer.

I think the main thing that keeps me at ThriftBooks is the atmosphere of friendliness and camaraderie. While being responsible for software that so many people depend upon could be stressful, the people around me make me feel like I generally have a low stress job.

Tom, Director of IT

I will be celebrating my 10 year anniversary next month at ThriftBooks, and I'm so glad that one of our family friends suggested I apply to ThriftBooks. It has been a great 10 years moving from administrator, to manager, and now Director of IT. In addition to the great culture and work environment at ThriftBooks, perhaps the most rewarding part of working here is seeing the impact our work has on our customers. It's very gratifying to work to improve our technology infrastructure and see how that improves our customers' experience. ThriftBooks cares about its customers and its employees and has been a rewarding and satisfying place to build my career.

Customers We Cherish

All of us here at ThriftBooks believe deeply in our mission to find a home for every book and to responsibly recycle those books whose time has come. The flip side of that is making sure all our customers are fully satisfied with every part of their experience with ThriftBooks. I highlighted in my Brand Promise blog how important this is for us and when a customer's experience may fall short of expectations, we are committed to doing what we can to make it right and better than before. While we have had this customer focus from our early years, it is with great pride that I share our Trustpilot current rating of "Excellent" with over 800,000 reviews from verified customers! While we recently passed this 800,000 review mark, rest assured we will place the same amount of attention and value on the next review as we did on our first 100 reviews. To all of our customers who may have submitted a review over the years, a very sincere thank you! Your feedback enables us to continue to deliver a best-in-class shopping experience.

As our birthday month comes to a close, on behalf of all ThriftBooks employees I send a heartfelt "Thank you" to our customers around the world, past, present, and future, for trusting us, growing with us, and reading with us. Because of your support, we have found homes for millions of books, enabled fulfilling careers, and inspired readers everywhere.

And we have only just begun!

About the Author: Barbara Hagen is the Vice President of Marketing and Sales here at ThriftBooks. She has more than 20 years of experience as a senior marketing executive, with an undergraduate degree in marketing from Syracuse University, an MBA in international marketing from NYU's Stern School of Business, and an MS in data analytics, also from NYU's Stern School.

Read more by Barbara Hagen