"But at the same time, it doesn't really feel authentic. "The look, the feel is obviously different than a traditional Barnes & Noble - that I did notice," Pitts-Wright said. Bookshelves get arranged not in rows of alphabetical stacks but in thematic nooks, meant to encourage shoppers to linger, browse and maybe find something they didn't know they wanted.įriends Kendra Wallace and Audryana Pitts-Wright stopped by the Pikesville store in search of the latest Ebony magazine, which this Barnes & Noble did not carry. New stores get a near-total makeover: brighter paint, lighter wood, a new layout. The store makeover faces scrutiny from shoppers The new Pikesville bookshop has a smaller city format, inside a former Pier 1 store. In northern Virginia, Barnes & Noble will soon open its largest store in years, at 28,000 square feet, in a former Office Depot space.
The chain has continued to close some stores even as it expanded into new ones. and consumers were really happy to be back in bookstores." "And Barnes & Noble was in a perfect position to capitalize on that because they were that fresh energy. "We scaled Everest in 2021, the highest point ever in the book market," said Kristen McLean, executive director of NPD BookScan. Then, 2021 set the record for book sales in the U.S., meaning the refreshed Barnes & Noble launched exactly when people were buying more books than ever. Retail bankruptcies created cheaper space for new stores, too. But the company also used that time to renovate the stores and recalibrate the business. Not long after Daunt took helm, the pandemic lockdowns left Barnes & Noble shuttered, followed by furloughs and layoffs. The chain took advantage of oddly opportune timing It's very much a - I read this, I loved it, I know this area really gravitates towards beekeeping books, so I'm going to create the best beekeeping display I can because this is my local store." It's not something that's dynamically pulled from a code. It's "a huge shift, frankly, in philosophy for us as a bookseller," DeVito says. The biggest change borrowed from the playbook of independent bookshops: Daunt gave local Barnes & Noble stores much more authority to order what their readers, in their area want to see.
Barnes and noble painted wooden blocks for kids series#
This was quick money, but often risked saddling prime spots with unpopular books and triggering a series of costs for the store.) (The chain stopped accepting publishers' payments for special displays. The retailer has embraced TikTok's BookTok and social-media influencers, and shook up its deals with publishers. But this buyout brought along a new CEO, James Daunt, who had led a seemingly miraculous turnaround of the U.K.'s largest bookstore chain Waterstones.ĭaunt pushed for Barnes & Noble stores to "weed out the rubbish" from their shelves. In 2019, Barnes & Noble was bought out by a hedge fund, often a perilous development. Its online store lagged behind, while its physical stores got overrun by gadgets, blankets and trinkets in pursuit of any kind of sale. The biggest change borrowed from indie bookstoresīarnes & Noble's collapse spanned the 2010s: The archetypal big-box villain ravaging independent bookstores eventually became lunch for Amazon.
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