Boswell Books owner Daniel Goldin refers to Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, by restaurateur Danny Meyer and released in 2006 from HarperCollins, when asked what principle guides him as a new small business owner. “Meyer wrote, 'I don't want to be the best restaurant. I want to be the customer's favorite restaurant,' ” Goldin says. “I can't be the best [bookstore]. I'm not going to have the best hours, I'm not going to have the most books, I'm not going to have the best Web site.” That's why, Goldin explains, he's focused on building relationships since he opened his 8,000-square-foot bookstore in Milwaukee's quirky East Side neighborhood in April.
Even though Goldin describes himself as an introvert, who prefers reading books to attending parties, he has consciously set out to be more extroverted, to “know the names of as many customers and have a relationship with as many of them as possible, because that's part of the decision people make when they're deciding where to shop,” he says.
But in a tough economy and with plenty of competition, independent booksellers have to do more than recognize regular customers if they expect to thrive. Goldin has been aggressively using technology to lure new customers from far beyond the neighborhood into his store. Besides an e-mail newsletter that he writes most of, “trying to infuse my enthusiasm into the experience,” and daily blogging, one of Goldin's 14 employees regularly posts news for Boswell Books' 500 Facebook fans on the store's page and Twitters from the store's account. Goldin's goal is to give customers a connection to the store by providing inside information. The store's different posts also include news about what is happening in nearby stores (what's the soup of the day at the cafe down the block; what's playing at the movie theater nearby) to try to drive foot traffic into the neighborhood.
Even though it took him 48 years to do it, it was probably inevitable that Goldin would open his own bookstore since books have always played an essential role in his life. Goldin relocated to Milwaukee from New York after reading abook by a self-publisher (“a rip-off of PlacesRated Almanac”), and while exploring his new city, Goldin “hit it off” with a store manager at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops and was hired as a bookseller there.
“I was going to do this for a year or two, then go back to book publishing and know so much more about bookselling,” recalls Goldin, who had left a publicist position at Warner Books to make the move. “But then I hit it off with the owner, David Schwartz, and I became his assistant.”
Goldin spent the next 23 years at Schwartz, working his way up from sales clerk to head buyer, then general manager. After Schwartz's death in 2004, his wife and daughter assumed ownership of the 72-year-old literary institution, until closing the remaining four Harry Schwartz outlets this spring because of a continuing decline in sales. Just 10 days later, after moving fixtures around and repainting the interior with his newly hired employees, who had all previously worked at various Harry Schwartz outlets, Goldin opened Boswell Books on the site of Schwartz's Downer Avenue store.
“I thought about this long and hard,” Goldin says. “This was probably the only opportunity in my life to open a bookstore like this. I needed to do it now, while the customer traffic was there.” After a terrible first month, sales have been better and “met projections” in August, Goldin says.
Insisting that the future belongs to those independent booksellers who are “nimble” and can “make decisions really fast,” Goldin refers to Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan, Oct.) as yet another book that's shaped his outlook as he embarks on his newest venture. “You have to do a lot more than you used to, to sell a book, but you can have a lot more personality than ever before. By being close to the customers, I can change faster, adjust more quickly,” he says.
|
