The Booksellers’ Dayton Location Prepping for September Opening

The Booksellers at Austin Landing in Dayton, Ohio, is the newest enterprise for Neil Van Uum, owner of The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis, Tennessee, and The Booksellers on Fountain Square in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The new 12,000-square-foot store is set to open in early September and will feature a sizeable children’s section as well as a café offering coffee and a light menu, and, most uniquely, a drive-through window.

“We’re positioning the children’s section at the front of the store, which I’ve never done before,” Van Uum said. “We’ll be doing a lot of new things with this store. A lot of reimagining, I guess you would say.”

Although he is not yet ready to reveal exactly what those reimagined elements will be, Van Uum said most of the innovations will be “environmental”  in nature and related to book assortment, shelving, and signage.

The new store is located in a large shopping complex currently under development in Dayton. Van Uum said each of his three stores differ in their own way: the Memphis store, like Dayton, is located in a typical shopping center but features a full-service restaurant, whereas The Booksellers’ Cincinnati location, which also features a café, is located in a storefront right in the middle of downtown Cincinnati.

“[Austin Landing] is a large project on the south side of Dayton that includes offices, a hotel, movie theater, lots of retail, and a lot of restaurants,” said Van Uum, who works out of the Cincinnati store. “It’s a big conglomeration of a lot of things. Right now it’s about 70 percent completed.”

Van Uum signed a 10-year lease for the store and is currently recruiting a team of booksellers to work the new location.

“We’ve never had a drive-through before, so we’re going to look to utilize that for the café, but I’m intrigued by other options that might present,” he said. “Initially, we want to make sure we get the café morning rush down, but as we move forward, we might make some options available to our membership as part of our loyalty program, like if they want to call in ahead of time to pick up a book order along with dinner.”

Going forward, Van Uum said the store will also establish partnerships within the community and will work with libraries and especially with schools. 

“We’re really going hard after schools, families, [promoting] kids’ reading, so we’ll be all over that. We’ll also link up with art institutions and likeminded entities that share a similar customer base with us,” he said. “We’ll find all sorts of ways to work with them.”

When it comes to the Dayton store’s inventory, “it will be a not untypical mix,” Van Uum said. “We’ll probably have 80 percent of our dollars in books and 20 percent of our dollars in other products, like magazines, gifts, and stationery.”

Van Uum said he feels confident launching this third enterprise, in part because he is hopeful about the state of bookselling.

“I think there is a lot of opportunity to sort of reimagine the next generation of bookstores in terms of size and scope, and this seemed like a great project to do it,” he said.

“Obviously, electronic books and virtual media have taken a big chunk of our business, but there are certain categories of the business that are still very strong. So it’s about trying to figure out what that market looks like and creating something that works, both for the customer and the business model.”

The store in the Austin Landing complex will hold a soft opening sometime in early September, to be followed by a grand opening.

“This week, we are right in the midst of trying to put some things together for the grand opening. We’re working with publishers to try to get some authors appearances set  up,” Van Uum said. “We’re also in the middle of hiring some staff and that seems to be going extremely well, so we’re just going to play this thing out over the next 10 weeks, open the doors, and see what happens.”