CEO of the Folio Society, Joanna Reynolds
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We meet retail turnaround expert Joanna Reynolds, the woman behind the revival of the Folio Society, one of Britain’s oldest publishing houses.
Ten years ago, the company was losing money and facing an existential threat from the digital revolution.
Joanna explains how she transformed the business from a failing book club to a profitable, employee-owned publisher.
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Presenter: Sam Fenwick Producer: David Cann
(Picture: Joanna Reynolds, CEO of the Folio Society, holding a book. Credit: Dunja Opalko)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.1 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily Meets from the BBC World Service with me, Sam Fennick. |
| 0:14.3 | Today we meet a turnaround woman who specialises in rescuing businesses in trouble. |
| 0:19.9 | And when I went in, we were losing $5 million and we needed to kind of figure it out. |
| 0:25.0 | And it was brilliant. |
| 0:25.7 | We turned it around in two years. |
| 0:27.2 | Joanna Reynolds has built her career on restructuring struggling businesses. |
| 0:31.9 | Three of them. |
| 0:33.0 | From global media brands to one of Britain's oldest publishing houses. |
| 0:37.5 | She specialises in stepping in when the future looks uncertain. |
| 0:42.1 | It was a bold move, but it was a move we had to make. |
| 0:44.5 | If we didn't make that move, we would have died as a business. |
| 0:48.1 | Her most recent success is the Folio Society, |
| 0:51.3 | a company that was losing money, facing the rise of e-readers and stuck in an aging |
| 0:57.7 | business model. Ten years on, it's profitable, growing and owned by its employees. I went to |
| 1:04.9 | meet her to find out how she did it and what it takes to save a company. |
| 1:21.2 | In a quiet corner of London, tucked away behind a modest facade, not far from the River Thames, |
| 1:25.5 | is a company that's made its mission to turn books into objects of beauty. |
| 1:31.6 | The Folio Society was founded in 1947 in the aftermath of World War II, |
| 1:38.3 | with a simple but radical idea that great literature deserves to be beautifully made and presented. |
| 1:48.8 | It publishes hardback editions with hand-drawn illustrations, gilded spines and heavyweight paper, books that are not just to be read, but to be cherished. Let's go inside. These are all our books. So you can see how |
| 1:59.7 | it's changed over the years. So these are the earliest books here on the left? Yes. So you can see how it's changed over the years. |
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