Rewriting the Ending

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On Monday morning, the new lease was signed. On Friday, the investment deal closed.

"I couldn't go to the restroom"

Clark Kepler still can't quite believe what he's been through as he sits in the Café Borrone in mid-January and reflects on the past five months. "At the end of August, I was going 100 miles per hour to close the store," he says. "In September, I was going 100 miles per hour to open it. Some days I was doing both at the same time. It was schizophrenic."

During the week leading up to the reopening, more than 100 volunteers helped get the store ready. On Saturday morning, between 500 and 800 people showed up for another rally on the plaza. Anne Banta talked about a new program through which people could buy memberships in Kepler's Literary Circle, with contributions ranging from $20 for students to $2,500 or more for the Platinum Circle. About 640 people signed up the first day. "There were women buying memberships, regular customers in their seventies, pledging $500, $1,000," says Cynthia St. John, one of Kepler's buyers. "And these are people on fixed incomes."

St. John was working one of the store's two registers. "We had lines out the door," she says. "I couldn't go to the restroom. I don't know the exact numbers, but that day was better than any Christmas season day ever. It was incredible. I mean, I didn't get out of here until midnight. And then I worked 14 or 18 days in a row, seven days a week, just off the energy."

Frank Sanchez, the head buyer, remembers putting in 60 hours a week or more, reinstating all the orders he had canceled at the end of August and trying desperately to catch up on what he'd missed while the store had been closed. That meant ordering tens of thousands of books, all of which had to be labeled and put on shelves. It was more than the staff could handle. More than 100 volunteers stepped forward again to do the grunt work.

Mainly, however, the community supported Kepler's by buying lots and lots of books--which called not only for loyalty but for patience. At one point, Kepler was working a register that had a long line in front of it. A customer put an armload of books on the counter. "Thank you for waiting," Kepler said.

"I've been waiting 30 days," the customer said.

Because the store had lost 40 percent of its staff by the time it reopened, many employees were new. Inevitably, mistakes were made, but few people complained. "What I heard, time and again, was customers saying, 'I want to thank you for reopening," says Sanchez. "There was a lot of goodwill going on."

When the dust settled and Kepler rang up the numbers, he found that book sales from the reopening through December 31 had increased over the same period the year before, even though the store had been open significantly fewer hours in October and November, when it had closed every day at 6 p.m. But the biggest surprise had to do with the membership program. Anne Banta and Daniel Méndez had met with considerable skepticism when they first proposed it. The company's new board of directors had set a goal of signing up 500 members and raising $70,000. Kepler's had blown away that target within the first two weeks. By January, 1,800 people had enrolled in the Literary Circle, contributing $200,000 toward keeping the store alive.

Is it possible for a small, independent bookstore to overcome the forces that led to its downfall?

As impressive as that was, it also suggested the challenge that lay ahead. The shock of Kepler's closing had galvanized the community. In the heat of the moment, hundreds of people had committed time, money, expertise, and labor toward preserving a business and an institution that they obviously valued greatly. But how do you maintain that enthusiasm? Would those 1,800 people sign up again next year or the year after? Above all, was it really possible for an independent bookstore to overcome the powerful forces that had led to its downfall?

Daniel Méndez, for one, has no illusions. "It's a grand experiment," he says. "Kepler's is only going to survive if the community buys there. And I'm going to make sure that everybody knows how it's going. Whatever happens won't come out of the blue this time. People will have plenty of notice. And if they choose to let it die, you know what? We all tried. If it dies again, it will be very dead."

Bo Burlingham is an Inc. editor-at-large and the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.

Part 2

The Kepler's saga continues'¦

Now comes the hard part. With the help of some of Silicon Valley's best and brightest, Clark Kepler goes in search of new sales and better margins. We will continue to follow the story periodically as it unfolds.

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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