Partner Spotlight is a series designed to highlight the vendors that partner with ABA to offer discounted products, services, and business opportunities to ABA members. Each installment, we interview a different partner to learn more about their organization and why indie bookstores matter to them.
Scattered Slime, brought to you by Laura Schaefer of Scattered Books in Chappaqua, New York, produces high quality slime kits for all themes and occasions.
Bookselling This Week met with Schaefer to learn more.
Bookselling This Week: I'd like to hear a little bit about how Scattered Books started creating Scattered Slime. How did y'all decide to start making the slime kits and offering them for wholesale?
Laura Schaefer: We have a pretty good party business, and we wanted to make the parties a little unique and a little extra special. So, one of the things that we offer is a Scattered Slime Party — I also love alliteration. I thought it would be fun to make little Scattered Slime kits for kids to take home. I created the fanciest little slime kit on the planet with a glitter label and all these fancy charms.
So, of course, since it was really hard to replicate, it took off in popularity right away.
Other stores wanted to buy it wholesale, because they really liked the quality of it. Plus, the design of the jar separates the charms on the top and the slime on the bottom, so kids can actually mix it together as an activity.
That was the whole idea, for kids to have this creative experience, like what I want for them whenever they come into the store. It was a natural offshoot of that.
We still do a lot of parties, but we also send a lot of slime kits out to other stores — toy stores, pharmacies, yoga studios, and of course, bookstores.
We do themes for certain events. We have pinkalicious slime. We have biscuit slime. I have a Dr. Seuss slime. And of course, our bookstore bunnies have their own slime.
We got the wholesale business going for other stores, but we also made a nice setup here at our store. We have all different kinds of slime, and we also have a big DIY wall of slime where kids can pick out their own slime and ingredients. They like that a lot.
A lot of adults have ordered it as well as a stress relieving tool. I actually did favors for an offsite corporate event with all kinds of custom ingredients.
I really like curating an experience, and this slime is a different way to express that. And I thought my ABA partner stores might like a sideline that's a little more different.
This is a quality sideline that can sell really well and help bolster the revenue of bookstores. It can be hard these days to draw any significant profit at a bookstore, and it's hard to balance books when you’re looking at sidelines versus events in terms of products, investment, and your own time. But I’ve found that this is a relatively easy way to get some people coming into the store over and over.
Plus, slime makes people happy.
We are offering event kits, so we can share this way of generating buzz with other ABA stores. For some reason, everyone loves a slime event. Kids come like wild zombies to these slime events, and it's like you need a bouncer.
It’s also a great stocking stuffer; we always do really well with it during the holidays.
BTW: I love that it has such a wide age appeal. So, if a bookstore reaches out to y'all about wholesale, what can they expect that conversation to look like?
LS: We would explain the product, the different offerings, and what makes our design unique — the double jar with the separate add-ins and the quality of slime.
I would also give them the ABA wholesale catalog so they could see all the themes we offer. We also do custom designs for just a dollar more per jar, so I've made a few slimes that are specific to a store, based on the store colors and icons.
BTW: So you’ve been doing wholesale for a little while before partnering with ABA. How are you managing this volume of slime?
LS: I do have a partner in the slime business for the wholesale, but it's definitely still a lot of a lot of work.
I like to be really organized about everything, so it's hard to be pulled in all the different directions of the store, and the slime, and the operational aspects of everything.
But it's not really any different than what bookstore owners are facing day-to-day anyway with all the different products, staffing, accounting, returns, orders — it's a lot to manage. So I feel like just throwing the slime in is fine! It's like, once you have five kids, you might as well have six.
BTW: It seems like you're doing an amazing job. Where might you want to expand in the future? Or are there any new drops that you want to tell us about?
Slime parties are a really good way to bolster bookstores since we naturally are constrained by a lower margin of profit on the books.
So, I think we're going to expand with a party in a box, where we send everything the store needs to host its own slime party. (Or an individual could buy it retail.) Slime parties are just a really good way to bring in a little extra revenue, especially during slower months or times.
We also have some really fun drops coming up.
We are going to have a Grinch slime, as well as a pirate slime, and a candy cane slime. Those are all outside of our normal holiday ones.
And I can make anything. If a store wants something specific that’s not in the catalog, they can contact me and I can put something together.
BTW: And that kind of keeps things interesting for you, right?
LS: It definitely does it. It keeps my imagination going!
We have what I call our “secret menu.” There are certain things that I saved just for this partnership with ABA. For example, our bookstore slime is exclusively available to ABA member stores.
BTW: That’s awesome. Is there anything that you’d like our booksellers to know?
LS: Just that it's been nice getting to know some of my fellow ABA booksellers just through this process and just talking through a lot of similar challenges we’re facing.
Since this did well at my store and helped offset a lot of other things, it seemed like a good thing to do for others that might be in the same boat.
ABA members are eligible for 10% the wholesale price, as well as free shipping. Visit the ABA Partners page for more details.