Blue Baboon Books Mobile Children’s Bookstore to Launch in Wichita

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This weekend, Sara Ornelas will stage the grand opening of Blue Baboon Books, Wichita, Kansas’ first and only mobile children’s bookstore.

“For years and years, I kept toying with the idea of opening a permanent retail location for a bookstore, but rent is really high and I didn’t think I would be able to get a loan,” said Ornelas, a substitute teacher and mother of two boys, ages seven and nine. But when a friend who owns a local brewery suggested Ornelas go mobile, she found that running a mobile business would cost about one-tenth of what it would take to open a bricks-and-mortar location.

Ornelas is now the proud owner of a brand-new 7-by-16-foot, custom-built cargo trailer outfitted with air conditioning and grid-wall shelving holding about 2,000 books.


Owner Sara Ornelas

“The guy from Trailers and More in Wichita [who built the trailer] was very up on how high the ceilings needed to be, what kind of insulation we would need, the amount of weight it could hold,” said Ornelas, who added that the 112-square-foot trailer “is a lot roomier than you might think.”

Ornelas said the grand opening of Blue Baboon Books on Saturday, July 16, will take place at Clifton Square Village, located in the main retail area of Wichita’s historic College Hill neighborhood. The next day, Ornelas will be setting up shop outside of a children’s yoga studio, and on July 23 she will coordinate an event with the Wichita Sports Forum, an athletic center and trampoline park.

Ornelas’ business model is multi-pronged. “Blue Baboon will offer three different services,” she said: children’s birthday parties, “book bounces,” and scheduled stops in the community. Birthday parties will entail about 90 minutes of book-themed fun for 15 to 20 children at a time and feature cake, a book-related activity, and a free book for each child. “Book bounces” will allow private homeowners to invite Ornelas to park outside their house; customers may then enter the “book buggy” to browse and shop, and homeowners get five percent of the day’s sales take in the form of merchandise.

Ornelas said, with a laugh, that she’ll be calling her bookmobile a “buggy” since “calling it a trailer doesn’t sound as classy.” “Blue Baboon Books,” the store’s unique name, she added, came out of a brainstorming session with her 22-year-old stepson, which involved alliteration with different colors and animal names.

The final prong of Ornelas’ business model is to park in different commercial areas around town and then announce the buggy’s location on social media. These stops will sometimes be staged in partnership with various family-oriented businesses and with nonprofits. Ornelas also plans to hold events with the local schools, where she works as a substitute teacher and volunteers at the school library. Both school and nonprofits will receive five percent of the total sales for the day in cash.

Ornelas said her bookmobile will carry books for babies and first-time readers through young adult, but inventory will lean a bit more heavily on books for first- through fourth-grade readers. Ornelas said she feels that this is the age when kids really begin to form their own opinions about what they like to read and to ask their parents to buy them specific books.

“I love reading. When I was a kid, books were my best friend and I passed that on to my kids. We probably have as many books in our house as we have in the store,” said Ornelas. “We’re also huge fans of Harry Potter; I’ve probably read Harry Potter about a dozen times.”

Throughout this new venture, Ornelas has received a lot of advice and assistance from friends, including several who own small businesses in Wichita. One friend, who runs a local children’s hair salon, helped Ornelas come up with creative marketing ideas, while another designed the Blue Baboon logo for her.

“I also have another friend who taught me how to back up a trailer, which is actually really hard to do,” said Ornelas, explaining that she was not required to apply for a special driver’s license. “My husband has done a lot of the hard labor as well, including installing the shelves.”

Ornelas hopes to receive her city vendor’s license by the end of the week, in time to stage a soft opening before Saturday’s grand opening event, which will feature giveaways of gift cards and promotional merchandise, such as bookmarks. In the future, Ornelas said she would like to host events with local children’s book authors and to help out the organizers of the Wichita Battle of the Books, a reading contest for students in grades three through five in the Wichita school district.

“The hope is that this becomes a seven-day-a-week job,” she said, “but to have that happen I need to book some more events and work on marketing a little more.” Going forward, Ornelas said her marketing efforts will include reaching out to the local media and making use of social media tools.