How came this to pass? (Part II)

To me, it seemed easy enough. Love books? Yep. Enjoy talking about them? Definitely. Great, then. Let’s open a bookstore!

I probably don’t need to tell you it’s not that easy. It all started with the location: Marcie found a lofty, light-filled space, but in its former life it was a barber shop, not a bookstore. It needed a bit of a glow-up. 

There was also the minor detail of actually learning how to run a bookstore. As I mentioned in Part I, Marcie and I both had backgrounds in marketing and communications at tech companies, but the only bookstore experience either of us had was simply walking inside them (and, for the record, we have a lot of experience in that area).

That’s when the crash course in bookselling began. We visited a few bookstores whose owners were gracious enough to answer a long, long list of questions. Marcie took a series of business classes that were incredibly useful – but led to the realization that there was still so much more to learn. 

Meanwhile, it was time to call in the forces – and this might be one of the best parts of Juliet’s origin story. Friends and family volunteered to take on all kinds of projects, and without hesitation were taken up on them. Everything from putting up wallpaper to moving in shelves to wiring lights to offering suggestions – it was a true bookish barn raising, with Marcie at the center of it all. 

I’ve had a front-row seat to watching everything unfold, and I plan to use this space to not only talk about books (because of course), but also to share fun anecdotes about starting – and running – an indy bookstore. We all love stories, don’t we? So here we go. Crack that spine. Flip a few pages. We’re in for a great adventure.