A new chapter in redecorating
Barnes & Noble uses lockdowns to spruce up hundreds of its stores
Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who took over last summer, thought the company’s stores were in need of some sprucing up. His plan, over the next two years or so, was to close locations on a rotating basis for a few weeks at a time to refurnish and refurbish.
Then the coronavirus closed almost all of them at once.
This spring, Barnes & Noble used lockdowns around the country as a chance to refresh more than 350 of its 614 stores, using small teams to move furniture around, paint walls and bring in new books. Revamping the stores was part of a broader plan to revive the company, a difficult task to begin with that has become more formidable under the weight of the pandemic.
“I knew I wanted to rip these stores apart and put them back together in a different way,” Daunt said. “And then suddenly: ‘Oh my goodness, they’re all shut. Let’s get to work.’
“At the same time,” he added, “we didn’t want to spend any money, because we didn’t know how long this pandemic was going to go on for.”
Jonathan Castro, manager of a Barnes & Noble at a strip mall in Yonkers, New York, spent about two weeks in April and May taking books off the shelves and reorganizing the furniture.
He was one of three people who came into the store every other day, alternating with another group of three.
Some of the walls are painted blue now, and the signs look a little different. Many more of the books face out on shelves, so that customers can see the covers as they walk by. The books have been reorganized — for instance, nutrition titles and cookbooks are next to each other now, instead of on opposite ends of the store.
Many of the bulky displays have been thrown away — Daunt said every store got a dumpster — and replaced by smaller tables that are easier to browse and to walk around.
“It’s a lot more open,” Castro said. “I can’t even explain how tight it was in here.”
But much about the store remains the same. The brown leafy wallpaper is still there, as are the green and beige carpets. The bookshelves aren’t new, and have the chips and scuffs to prove it. There are still indents in the rugs that mark the old layout.
This is not the first makeover that Daunt has orchestrated. A bookseller who opened his first store, Daunt Books, in London in 1990, he was put in charge of Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain, nine years ago. He managed, over time, to return that company to profitability.
Elliott Advisors, the private equity firm that bought Waterstones in 2018, now also owns Barnes & Noble, which it purchased last year for $683 million. Elliott brought Daunt to New York to try a similar strategy to the one he used in Britain.
Fundamental to his approach, he said, is to keep the efficiencies and buying power of a big chain while giving individual stores a bit more independence, which would, in theory, allow them to better reflect and cater to local tastes.
Each store’s manager will have more say in how they augment stock. If a book sells through and they don’t think it makes sense to restock it, they don’t have to — though there are limits.
“If they don’t keep ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in stock, they’ll find someone knocking on their door quite quickly,” Daunt said. “Frankly, if they’re good at their job, we’ll leave them totally alone. But we have to have control in case they’re less good at it. It’s not a free pass to incompetence.”