By: Deborah Johnson Wood
Customer loyalty, new services and ingenuity are all reasons that Schuler Books in downtown Grand Rapids is in such demand that it had to expand its mid-week evening hours. The store, which opened last October at 40 Fountain NW, offers downtown workers a place to sit down for a healthy bite at the Chapbook Café, pick up a gift, a card or a book, and grab a latté to take back to the office.
“We’ve gotten busier in the evening so we decided to expand our Wednesday hours to 8 p.m. to accommodate the people going to downtown festivals and Blues on the Mall,” says Emily Stavrou, spokesperson.
Stavrou says the store draws a lot of foot traffic from conference attendees at DeVos Place. For the past several years, Schuler’s has supported keynote speakers who are authors by ordering a supply of their books and staffing the sales table at the conference. The difference is that now the downtown store handles these duties instead of the 28th Street store.
“It’s a great way to corner those markets and make ourselves more visible,” Stavrou adds.
The store’s offering of unique services and events—such as lunch catering, lunchtime book signings, and Final Friday concerts on the last Friday of each month—bring in customers. The June 27th Final Friday concert features Robin Lee Berry from 6:30 to 8.
“A pleasant surprise is that customers who patronized our other stores are now patronizing our downtown store because they work downtown,” Stavrou says.
Source: Emily Stavrou, Schuler Books
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Deborah Johnson Wood is the development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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