I feel stale," "I want a shot in the arm," and "We've been doing things the same way for too long" were among the top complaints given by nearly 50 booksellers who attended a book display lab that was part of NEBA's seminar on "Merchandising in the New Millennium" last month.
Many from smaller stores and specialty shops in particular sought creative solutions to space challenges and ways to mix sidelines with books so their stores still felt like bookstores. Independent book consultant Suzanne Welsh, formerly of Readmore Bookstore in Mansfield, Ohio, and Readmore general manager Terri Hudson transformed a conference room at the University Park Hotel at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., into a design school for booksellers. The program, originally developed last fall by GLBA, drew booksellers from as far away as Wisconsin and Ohio, who hoped to be able to learn to replicate the program in their regions.
Welsh and Hudson presented slides of window and in-store displays for clothing stores like the Gap and Old Navy to show just how visually sophisticated retailers—and their customers—can be. "Your customer lives in a world where the Gap exists, Old Navy exists. They bring that baggage with them when they shop at your store. Stores like the Gap and the Limited do a whole store reset every two weeks," said Welsh, who encouraged booksellers to borrow ideas from other businesses to compete for consumer dollars.
Welsh recommended that booksellers read Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (Touchstone) and Ken White's Display and Visual Merchandising (St. Francis Press) to better understand merchandising's influence on consumer spending. She offered inexpensive tricks for booksellers to use to tweak their displays to sell more books. "Most customers don't approach your store head on," Welsh said. "They're coming from an angle, so you need to slant whatever you have." She also suggested that space-limited stores consider using the top shelves of their bookcases for display.
Other tips included adding a spotlight or track light to highlight a display area and purchasing children's tables, colorful cubes, sofa tables and/or baker's shelves for displays. For further ideas, Welsh recommended reading Architectural Digest and home furnishing magazines, as well as visiting stores like Pier I and unfinished furniture outlets. As a reality check on just how effective a display is, Welsh advised taking slides and then viewing them backward to check for height and symmetry.
Hudson said that she completely remerchandises Readmore nine times a year. "If something's not moving, redisplay it," she advised. Her ideas of display have little to do with the old stack 'em high philosophy of bookselling, and everything to do with color and height. Her essential tools of the trade consist of fishing line, scissors, double-sided sticky tape, masking tape, pins, posters, a sewing kit and a staple gun.
To turn browsers into buyers, Hudson suggested inexpensive tricks such as enlarging book covers and mounting them on foam core—"books are just too small," she said—and making calligraphic signs about the books on display and then putting the signs into photo frames, à la Restoration Hardware. Mass retailers, she reminded listeners, emphasize a single must-have product, like chinos, and then do a blow-up of that one product in the window.
Sideline items often make for interesting props in displays, especially those that tell a story. Hudson recommended that booksellers who don't stock many sidelines experiment with growing their sidelines slowly, starting with items that supplement the books in their strongest-moving sections. Gift shows, she noted, are often a good source of items beyond the standard literary add-ons. "When I first came to Readmore 10 years ago," said Hudson, "the only sideline was magazines. We added one sideline at a time. Now, at least 50% of what we have—particularly for kids—is sidelines." She credited the sidelines business with helping cushion the blow when a Barnes & Noble opened near the 8,000-square-foot Readmore five years ago. "Books plummeted 33%," said Hudson, "and sidelines went up 45%."
To help the booksellers practice what Hudson and Welsh preach, they were given a chance to tear down and rebuild displays that the two had created earlier in the morning around authors Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss; Rick Bayless's cookbook Mexico; and themes such as Mother's Day, Summer Gardening, Butterflies and Writing, using books, sidelines, and fixtures donated by the nearby Brookline Booksmith. The idea was to make sure that no one left the course feeling stymied by the idea of putting together a display. Welsh quoted J'Amy Owens of Retail Group Inc.: "Most retailers border on the visually illiterate."
Many booksellers concurred with Elly Preston, co-owner of the 2,000-square-foot Armchair Bookstore in Dennis, Mass., who said the one-day seminar was "inspiring. We were reassured that we are doing a lot of things right. But we came away realizing that we did have to make displays a priority." Similarly, Fran Gardner, manager of the 3,000-square-foot World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield, Mass., said, "I found it tremendously helpful. I liked that it had concrete suggestions." For Scott Meyer, owner and president of the Merritt Bookstore in Millbrook and Red Hook, N.Y., "The best part was it motivated me to implement some of the ideas."
