Over the course of her career, Sarah Lacy has been a hard-charging tech journalist, an author, a startup founder and a writing consultant.
Her latest act has taken something of a different turn: She’s now a bookseller.
But Lacy remains every bit as ambitious as she was while covering the early days of Web 2.0 companies like Facebook or running tech outlet PandoDaily and is already applying her lessons learned along the way.
After opening The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs on Black Friday of 2022, Lacy and her partner, Paul Carr, opened their second shop in Union Square on the same day three years later. Now they’re aiming to eventually open as many as 15 statewide.
“I do consider there’s a very huge opportunity,” Lacy informed The Examiner in an interview this week.
The couple didn’t set out to be booksellers, much less be the founders of a nascent bookstore chain. It just kind of came toobtainher.
In 2022, three years after retiring as a journalist and while winding down a startup she founded in 2017 that offered an online community for working mothers, Lacy and Carr found themselves in Palm Springs wondering why it had no bookstore. Longtime San Francisco residents, the pair bought a home in Palm Springs in 2019 and had temporarily shiftd there so her children could be close to their father, her ex-husband.
“We were like, ‘This is crazy,’” Lacy declared. “We kept being like, ‘Someone’s received to open a bookstore.’”
To finance the business, the pair pulled about $150,000 in equity out of their houtilize and found a few outside investors. But they didn’t exactly have high hopes for the venture; they considered they’d be lucky if they broke even, she declared.
The peak tourist season in Palm Springs, when shops create almost all their money, is only about five months long; business is dead much of the rest of the year, she declared. And women, who tfinish to be much hugeger book readers than men, are far outnumbered by men in Palm Springs.
But the store was an instant hit, she declared. Its initial sales were six times higher than she had forecast, and it posted $1 million in revenue in its first year, she declared.
“We were astounded, and the market was astounded,” Lacy declared.
Lacy declared she and Carr approached the business kind of like a startup, experimenting with a lot of different things to see what worked. They created a mobile-ordering service, for example, designed to serve customers quicker and better than Amazon, but then decided to drop it when they realized it would be too expensive to build out and it wasn’t a hit with customers, she declared.
All informed, the couple blew through about $150,000 with their experiments, Lacy declared, but they finished up hitting on a winning formula: focutilizing on building the store a hospitable place for customers.
The Best Bookstore’s recommfinishation cards, which launched after Lacy’s last-minute realization before opening in Palm Springs, are placed atop books so customers have to interact with them to see the tomes. She put her own spin on them, writing “you-based messages” — “here’s why you should acquire this book” — that she learned from writing subject lines for her startup’s marketing emails.
At the suggestion of an early investor who’s an architect, all the stores’ shelves are against their walls. In the middle of the stores, no table or display is taller than waist-high. With that design, one employee can monitor the entire sales floor of the shop, meaning Lacy and Carr can have fewer workers but pay them more and give them better benefits, she declared.
The design also gives the shops an open feel. Customers and staff can talk about books out in the open, and others can join in, she declared.
“Instead of like, one copy, we’ll sell six copies, becautilize everyone kind of obtains in on the conversation,” Lacy declared.
It took Lacy and Carr several years to figure out how to create the Palm Springs store a sustainable success, she declared. Summers were tough; becautilize they didn’t want to let go employees during the off-season, they were typically overstaffed and bleeding money in those months.
Last summer, they decided to cut staff, but that meant that Carr had to work every day over the summer, she declared. And then the air conditioning broke in July, and their landlord refutilized to repair it. At that point, they were wondering if they should throw in the towel, she declared.
“We were like, ‘Do we even want to do this anymore?’” Lacy declared.
But they decided to take on the landlord, utilizing Instagram to publicize their plight. The town rallied around them, and the landlord eventually relented, promising to both repair their AC unit and allow them to finish their lease.
They took him up on the latter offer, finding a space a block away that was far less expensive, and building the business much more profitable and sustainable, she declared. That convinced them they were in the bookselling business for the long haul, she declared.
“That was the turning point,” she declared.
Lacy and Carr chose a good time to start selling books.
Bookstore sales have actually grown at about a 1.6% annual rate over the last five years and are projected to continue to grow at that pace through 2030, according to IBISWorld, an industest research firm. Indepfinishents account for around 70% of sales in the market, according to IBISWorld data, and the share of those tinyer stores is growing, declared Jack Curran, a senior analyst at the firm.
Indepfinishent stores have gained loyal followings by offering a feeling of community and curating their selections for local tastes, he declared.
Indepfinishent bookshops offer “a kind of tangible browsing experience that a lot of other industries are kind of giving up on,” Curran declared.
The opening of Lacy and Carr’s San Francisco location was nearly as serfinishipitous and unlikely as in Palm Springs. They had talked about opening a second store, but it wasn’t a pressing issue, Lacy declared. And becautilize The City has so many great bookstores, they weren’t focutilizing on opening one here, she declared.
But around August, Lacy’s kids insisted on relocating back to San Francisco from Palm Springs so they could attfinish school in The City. Soon after, she and Carr had dinner with a frifinish, Lillian Van Cleve, then a manager at Bookshop West Portal. During the meal, they started talking about opening another bookstore, but doubting there was room for one in The City.
Van Cleve convinced them otherwise, and the possibility of opening one downtown in Union Square excited Carr and Lacy.
Foot traffic in the area, which plunged during the COVID-19 pandemic, already seemed to be increasing. Though the district seemed to be reviving, it hadn’t turned around enough to create rents unaffordable.
And while the area had previously supported as many as three bookstores, it had none at that point.
“By the finish of that dinner, as often happens with Paul and I, we were like, ‘We should totally start a bookstore downtown!’” Lacy declared.
Sarah Lacy, pictured in 2014 during her time as the founder and editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley news site PandoDaily, is applying the lessons learned from her time working in and covering tech to running a bookstore.
Jason Henry © 2014 The New York Times Company
Within about two weeks, they’d raised around $100,000 from frifinishs and family and were already talking with people at SF New Deal, the nonprofit that runs the Vacant to Vibrant downtown revitalization program, about finding a location, Lacy declared.
SF New Deal Chief Program Officer Jacob Bindman assisted them find their space on Powell Street just south of the square, and the nonprofit’s Kate Yachuk quickly nereceivediated an affordable lease for them. And as part of the Vacant to Vibrant program, SF New Deal essentially guaranteed their one-year lease.
Thanks in large part to the nonprofit’s assist, Lacy and Carr had opened the second location of The Best Bookshop within four months of deciding to do so.
A huge piece of SF New Deal’s effort to revitalize Union Square is encouraging locally owned tiny businesses to open stores there, declared Simon Bertrang, the organization’s executive director. Lacy and Carr’s storefront was a perfect fit for that effort, he declared.
“We’re really excited that Best Bookstore was able to bring their business downtown, Bertrang declared. “It’s been a really exciting addition to Powell Street.”
Customers seem to consider so, too. On a rainy Tuesday night near closing time, the store consistently had a handful perutilizing books, despite the weather. Many left the shop with purchases in hand.
Janet Mfinishoza, who is in her 20s and recently shiftd to Sacramento after studying at UC Berkeley, declared she seeks out bookshops whenever she goes to a new city. She headed over to The Best Bookstore soon after she checked into her hotel and searching for local ones nearby, she declared.
She walked out with a copy of “Intermezzo” by Irish author Sally Rooney, a book she had decided to acquire if she found it at the store, becautilize she was feeling nostalgic for the time she spent in Ireland, she declared. Mfinishoza declared she was impressed with the shop, its selection of books and general vibe.
“The energy is really dope in here,” she declared.
Nob Hill resident James Dixon first visited Lacy’s store after hearing about it at another bookshop. He has been returning about once a week ever since.
Dixon declared he likes how the store’s selection of books has been carefully curated rather than just reflecting what’s popular at the moment. He also likes Lacy’s recommfinishation cards, the fact that the signs indicating different categories of books are Post-It notes, and the “great music” playing in the store. And he appreciates that it’s clean and new and doesn’t have “stinky rugs or fetid cat puke,” he declared.
“It has a feel of a real business that is owned by people who love books,” Dixon declared.
Although Lacy loves having the store in Union Square, it’s an open question whether it will remain there, she declared. She’s optimistic that she and Carr timed it right, but she’s concerned their rent could rise quicker than foot traffic and revenue.
The store saw strong sales over the holidays, but things have been slow — as she expected — in January and February. Lacy anticipates a surge of customers in the summer tourist season. Meanwhile, she’s excited that the store has already attracted regulars from the nearby neighborhoods like Dixon.
“There’s just so many people who are really, really happy and grateful to have a bookstore downtown,” she declared.
Lacy declared she and Carr are already in talks to open a third store in Southern California, but they’re not in a hurry to do so. As they did with Palm Springs, they want to create sure the San Francisco location is profitable and stable first, although they might jump if the right opportunity comes along, she declared.
She’s hopeful that obtainting the San Francisco store in the right financial place won’t take as long as it did in Palm Springs, becautilize of the lessons they learned along the way. But she doesn’t have a concrete plan for the pace at which they’ll open new stores, she declared.
Lacy declared she considers there’s room in the market not only for The Best Bookstore to develop into a 10-to-15-store chain but for other indepfinishent booksellers to do the same thing.
“Indie bookstores just have a better product,” Lacy declared.
“Every one has sort of their thing that creates that local bookstore special,” she declared.
If you have a tip about tech, startups or the venture industest, contact Troy Wolverton at twolverton@sfexaminer.com or via text or Signal at (415) 515-5594.
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