In the late 1950s, Louis Strymish walked away from his budding career as a Harvard-trained chemist, borrowed a few thousand dollars from a friend, and opened a small bookstore outside Boston. An inveterate reader and eccentric who had to overcome severe dyslexia as a child, Strymish didn't think it worth the trouble to organize his store's wares into standard categories. Instead, he just dumped the books from the publishers' boxes right onto the shelves, figuring buyers could hunt down the books they wanted by looking up the publisher or by rummaging randomly. It wasn't just the chintzy, cramped décor, complete with unpacked boxes and piles of unshelved books, that made the place a mess. To the typical browser, the shelves may have seemed to be a hopeless hodgepodge. But less sorting meant less staff, which translated into lower prices. And a funny thing happened: A lot of people discovered they liked hunting through a mess of oddly arranged books and discovering several they never would have thought to look for.
Today, customers of the New England Mobile Book Fair--or Strymish's, as it's known locally--pick their way through a dense, dingy, 30,000-square-foot forest of still-cheap, still-cramped shelving creaking with some two million titles. The store is run by Louis's sons, Jon and David, who took over when Louis passed away in 1983, and by their childhood friend Steve Gans, who they hired away from a law firm. Jon has stocked the store with an odd mix of new and bargain books, the latter consisting mostly of steeply discounted and remaindered books. His impulsive choices, unsupported by research or guidelines, would baffle most bookstore buyers. Last year, for example, he grabbed 500 copies of Edward Gorey's The Headless Bust--a book that probably saw no order larger than a dozen from any other bookstore in the world.
The Book Fair is a crazy quilt of a company. Gans operates out of the landing of a back stairway; all the back-office rooms are filled with piles of books, leaving little space for desks. David Strymish co-founded a coffee bean business that occasioned the importing of an industrial roaster into the company, and added an online cookbook business called Jessica's Biscuit, which competes head-to-head with Amazon.com. Where Amazon famously runs a robotic, hyperorganized, Segway-scooterized fulfillment operation, Jessica's inventory room looks more the way one imagines a Dumpster outside an Amazon warehouse might look. "Okay, it's not as organized as it could be," says Gans, surveying the scene.
Does this seem like a rather inept way to run a company that has to compete with the highly ordered likes of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS), and Borders (NYSE:BGP)? Actually, the Book Fair stands within five miles of two Barnes & Noble and two Borders stores constituting some 120,000 square feet of direct competition. But with sales roughly in the $10 million range, the squat, featureless store outsells all four of them and manages to produce about twice the sales of an average big-box bookstore. In fact, that large, strange hodgepodge of discount books is a money machine, accounting for 50 percent of the operation's revenue. Jessica's, meanwhile, has been able to match or beat Amazon's pricing and cheap shipping while building sales and remaining profitable.
The Book Fair is a mess. And therein, I believe, lies the secret of its success. It saves a fortune by not creating a spacious, pristine, perfectly arranged shopping area. Its confusing sea of discount books resonates with customers. Its managers do what they want, jumping on opportunities when they see them; the projects that fly are nurtured, the ones that don't are allowed to languish. Its operations rely not on finely tuned, heavily automated processes but on the enthusiasm and savvy of employees who work the way that suits them best.