Case Study: Lilydale Books, from 10 Schools to 42
Short form
Lilydale Books is a family business that has supplied textbooks and stationery to Victorian schools for more than thirty years. For most of that time it served ten schools, because the way the work was done could not carry more. Redgum built the capability layer by layer: first the back office, then teacher booklists, then parents ordering online, then a counter that hands over a packed order in seconds and a single home for every student’s ebooks. Lilydale now serves 42 schools without growing its permanent team, and onboarding a new school has gone from a major imposition to a routine step.
The challenge
The business had everything a supplier needs except room to grow. Its relationships with schools were strong and its reputation was earned. It knew each school’s subjects, timing and quirks in a way no national catalogue did. But that knowledge lived with the people, and the work ran on spreadsheets, paper booklists and phone calls.
Every January the same thing happened. Too many orders, too little visibility, too many errors, all landing on the same small team at once. The back-to-school rush was controlled chaos, and every new school would have meant more of it. That was the real constraint. Not demand, not reputation, but how much the team could carry by hand in a few weeks each year.
Starting with the unglamorous part
The first thing we built was modest: a better way to organise books against orders in the back of house. Nobody would put it in a brochure. But it cut the time the team spent managing stock before peak season, reduced errors, and gave everyone a view of where things stood that they had never had. That was the proof of value. Time saved, errors down, capacity freed.
It also mattered for what came next. The data structures and processes we put in place were designed with the larger picture in view, so the second phase extended a foundation rather than starting again. A generic inventory package would have been faster to install, and it would have tidied the back office. It would never have led to anything a competitor could not buy too.
What we built
A school booklist looks simple from the outside. It is not. Each student’s list depends on their year level and the subjects they take, lists change during the year, and families with several children are juggling several lists at once. So we built it the way the school year actually works. The school nominates its teachers. Teachers build the list for each subject they run, starting from last year’s rather than from scratch. Students are assigned to their classes, and parents receive one combined list for their child, with every book for every subject in one place. They can add or remove items, pay, and choose pickup or delivery.
Each release removed a job the team had done by hand, and each one opened the door to the next. At the counter, a point-of-sale system built around how Lilydale actually sells means a parent can scan a QR code or give their child’s surname and collect the whole packed order, while stock, costs and pickup update behind the scenes. For ebooks, Lilydale resells titles from eight major publishers, each with its own security and provisioning system. We connected Lilydale’s platform to each of them, so a student’s whole library sits behind one Lilydale login.
The outcome
Teachers stopped spending hours on booklist administration. Parents stopped navigating separate ordering processes for each child and subject. And because each list is set up once, at the source, the error rate dropped to a level the team could manage comfortably.
Lilydale went from ten schools to 42 without growing its permanent team. Onboarding a new school, once a huge imposition, is now a matter of setting up the school, its teachers and its lists in a platform built for exactly that. National suppliers with generic catalogues have scale. Lilydale has thirty years of knowing how Victorian schools order, and now that knowledge is built into a system that delivers it to every family, every year.
Where it goes next
The platform is not finished, because the business is not. This year Redgum delivered a major stock and warehouse release, and the team is now working on direct provisioning with ebook publishers and bringing the online and offline readers onto the same footing.
The easy decision, after the first win, would have been to stop. Lilydale kept going. Thirty years of a family’s knowledge, built into a system, layer by layer: that is the difference between automating a process and building a capability.