
Claire van den Broek, co-owner of Huxley & Hiro, outside her Wilmington bookstore
WILMINGTON — Here is one clue that Claire van den Broek is doing all the right things 18 months after opening an independent bookstore in downtown Wilmington: You’re prepping to expand into larger space two blocks closer to Rodney Square.
After a lengthy renovation in their current location at 419 North Market St., van den Broek and business partner Ryan Eanes plan to move next July into the space now occupied by Wintsch Violins (formerly David Bromberg Fine Violins) at 601 North Market St. Once there, they’ll have a larger performance space upstairs.
“Huxley & Hiro has been a game changer for Downtown Wilmington,” says Michael Maggitti, executive director of Downtown Visions, a private nonprofit that manages the Business Improvement District. “Of all the things that Claire does well, and there are many, the most significant to me is her willingness to collaborate. She regularly partners with local authors and entrepreneurs, neighboring businesses, and the community at large for a number of initiatives (Wednesday night’s Delaware Author Fair at the Queen is a perfect example).
“The Huxley & Hiro story is almost unbelievable – West Coast college professor falls in love with Downtown Wilmington, purchases and renovates a historic property despite the pandemic, and builds a thriving bookstore business in this digital age.”
Van den Broek is prepared for the first question: How does a small, independent bookstore compete with online retailers like Amazon and superstores?
“You can actually get your book same day from us rather than having to wait one or two days for Amazon Prime,” she says. “You’re not paying a $130 or so subscription fee a year to get things same day at our store… Indie bookstores like us are just trying to help people discover books rather than always get pushed by an algorithm that is suggesting what’s most similar to what you last read. You can find things here that you may not have realized you wanted to read or considered before.”
Van den Broek points to an article in The Guardian earlier this month about the success of independent bookstores.
“We make sure that we have as many new books and books that we think are genuinely interesting as possible to constantly keep that collection turning over so that even if you’re someone who comes in every week, you’re always finding something new here,” she said.
The aforementioned Delaware Author Fair on Oct. 23 was a huge success, according to van den Broek: “Fantastic sales, constant stream of traffic, 350 people in 2.5 hours!”
Huxley & Hiro’s origin story starts with Claire and Ryan as professor friends in Oregon. Ryan moves to the East Coast as a Wilmington-loving professor at Temple University and Washington College in Maryland. Claire often travels East to visit, staying on his couch, and falling in love with Market Street.
One day in late 2017, they looked out the window and realized the Ninth Street Book Store (owned by Jack and Jemma Buckley) was closing after 40 years.
“We thought a community this size surely can support at least one new bookstore,” she says. “They were retiring, but they were still doing all right before that. We were so tired of just being stuck in this academic bubble all the time and we were thinking, how about we create a space where we could host events. Bookstores are not just retail stores, they’re community spaces, and we really wanted to be part of something like that.”
A successful real-estate investor, author, and professor in comparative literature, van den Broek financed the building purchase and renovations herself (and from a short-term loan from her mother).
This is not to say it’s been easy. She acknowledges that Monday and Tuesday foot traffic is slow but says the rebirth of downtown, led by developers Rob and Chris Buccini of the Buccini Pollin Group (BPG) and support from organizations like Downtown Visions, has made a huge difference. Still, she’d love to see more office-related traffic and is excited by the imminent arrival of businesses like Incyte.
“There has been a massive change in the schedule of when people are on Market Street,” she says. “My concern is that many businesses, especially restaurants, have not adapted to this. There’s this perception that Market Street is still an office place where you just find people going out for lunch or something and then after that (and on weekends) it kind of dies. But in reality, there are a lot of people who live downtown looking for things to do. They don’t come out as much Monday through Wednesday because there is nothing open for them, but I think they would.
“So many cafes just open for that office crowd for breakfast and lunch. We have tourists and locals coming in here [in the late afternoon] asking if there’s anywhere they can get coffee or something after 2 pm, and there’s just nothing, which is why we’re moving up to 601 North Market Street and bringing in a coffee roaster.”
Van den Broek says the current space won’t go to waste. A bakery has first right of refusal on the space, but if they can’t get the funding, she’d like to develop it for small retailers in a marketplace format (think of a DECO-type layout) where tenants take out a 12-month lease and an organization like LAUNCHER Community Business Resources on North Lincoln Street helps them start a business, create a business plan, and teaches them the basics.
“You get more places open, you’ll get more people strolling along Market Street.”
The move will be a win-win. Van den Broek says the violin shop is moving to get more parking space, and Huxley & Hiro will get a large performance venue with a stage on the second floor.
“We would be able to use that for much larger author events because our capacity is quite low in this space,” she said.
How Downtown Visions and BPG support them
“If I have to have a woman working alone at night, Downtown Visions will ensure security comes by and checks in, and an officer will walk them to the car if necessary. When we have events, they’ve made the Colonial parking lot at Fifth and Orange available for us for free because there’s such limited parking. It’s like having this big marketing machine that also keeps our area clean and safe working for you, essentially for free.
“I keep telling other businesses looking at the Riverfront or Trolley Square to come to Market Street because they’ll have this massive marketing, safety, and cleaning force behind them that will come and help you out,” she says. “You don’t have that in any of those other places. They give us a free tent for outside events if it’s raining; they’ve provided tables to put out front. It’s incredible.”
Should they pivot to the marketplace concept, she says they’ll make rent more affordable.
“It benefits me as the bookstore owner to have more retail nearby because it means I will get more foot traffic. You can be a capitalist and say, my businesses here will be profitable, but I will forfeit some of that profit because I’m more interested in being successful. It doesn’t mean that I lose money; it just means that I don’t take as much money out of these businesses as I could. In exchange, I make a better community because I live above my bookstore. I want to live in a great community, so that has value to me.”
She is thinking the name of the retail marketplace—if things turn out that way—could be Made in Delmarva because she sees so much interest in Delaware-made products from tourists and people who live locally. They’ve make things like magnets and postcards that they couldn’t find elsewhere, so they just started producing them themselves.
“Can you believe we sold over a thousand postcards in one year?” she asked. “We thought we might sell a few postcards. We’ve sold over a thousand.”
What van den Broek wishes she had known a year ago
Despite growing up working from age 12 in her family-run retail stores in the Netherlands, she hadn’t considered a bookstore has about 10,000 different inventory items.
“You don’t think books expire, but they do,” she said. “A book may do well for two weeks and then you don’t sell another copy. You’re evaluating hundreds and hundreds of purchases to determine whether you should reorder that or whether that has had its 20 minutes of fame and it’s gone and done.”
In other words, just because you’re an expert at one thing does not mean you should not consider what will change if you pivot.
“You can pull a list of your demographics, which we did because my business partner is a professor of advertising. But that doesn’t mean those are the people who come through your door and it doesn’t mean you really know what they read. You have to constantly ask, What are you interested in? What do you want to buy? Just because something is a bestseller doesn’t mean your community wants it.”
Claire says she and Ryan would like more of their audience to be people in their twenties and thirties, but she says the audience mostly remains 80% women, well-educated, over 50, and affluent. Many are renting apartments from BPG, including young people.
“They love having a bookstore nearby and are not afraid of downtown. They live here, and they see it,” she says.
That said, there have been surprises. Both thought political books would sell really well, given the proximity of the Biden and Harris headquarters.
“We never sell political books. There’s no interest. People from there come in all the time. They don’t want to read the politics books. They want something different. Some lawyers don’t want books about law. They want some escape.”
Something less easy to understand is many people are afraid of downtown.
“I didn’t think we would encounter so much resistance from people in the suburbs,” she says. “I quickly learned that my bookmark needs to have a picture of my store to show people that downtown is beautiful because they all think that we’re some kind of Detroit-like wasteland. My accountant on Concord Pike told me he hasn’t been downtown in 10 years. That’s shocking to me.”
But van den Broek says customers walk in after eating at neighboring restaurants and feel safe.
“I know many women who live here, and we feel safe walking around,” she says. “But you can’t convince people who say they used to work downtown 20 years ago.”
Advantages and disadvantages for a women-owned business
Van den Broek says there are a lot more resources today for woman-owned businesses but acknowledges that the barriers can be greater because it’s harder for women to be taken seriously. She also tells the story of an opening-day encounter when a older gentleman, a complete stranger, recognized her from some media coverage and put his arm around her waist.
“You wouldn’t do that If this were a male business owner, not in a million years,” she says. “There are still a lot of people who mistake the friendliness of female retail workers for, oh, she must like me, and it’s just you think people would get that message now, but they don’t. They just still think, maybe she wants my number.
Creative vision vs day-to-day management
Van den Broek does all the ordering for the store but asks her employees for input. She’s had cases where she says no to a bookseller because one of her employees who manages a category doesn’t think it’s a good idea.
The bookseller says, ‘You’re the owner. Why don’t you just tell ’em you want to order this? And I’m like, because I trust the judgment of my employees. They spend time here; they work on that section. I listen to them because I want strong employees who influence the store and feel comfortable here, which helps me retain employees.
“The balance you have to maintain is making sure they feel like they have a positive impact and that they’re impacting the community also with their engagement here. They want something in exchange even when you can’t pay $30 an hour.”
Finding the right strategic mix
Van den Broek says she and Ryan have tried many things to market the store and have kept what works.
She says there’s a lot of trial and error there for us. “We’ve tried a billboard, we’ve tried sending postcards to people’s homes, and most of those didn’t return more than maybe five customers to the store. That’s a massive investment for almost no return. Part of that is because people in the suburbs will not come into downtown. One thing that works really well is organic advertising.
“Downtown Visions is constantly introducing us to other businesses, even before we opened. Sometimes you think, why would I partner with a smoothie company? What do smoothies and bookstores have in common? We can do a street fair together where we all set up and you provide smoothies, and we set up books and stickers and things outside. Market Street is amazing in that it is all small businesses.”
But she quickly adds that BPG constantly promotes and supports small businesses because that’s mostly within their spaces. She explains there are very few chains downtown, which means she has a great opportunity to connect directly with owners of businesses that she wouldn’t have in a bigger city where the chains will never read her emails.
“The Facebook thing is a puzzle to us because the Indie bookstore group on Facebook has a lot of success with Facebook advertising because it tends to be an older audience. I’m kind of struggling to reach younger audiences there. I don’t have that many followers on TikTok, but my videos will instantly get a thousand views easily and on Instagram it’s the same. I can get a thousand or more fairly easily. But Facebook, I’ll get a hundred views for a video that has 2,000-3000 on TikTok and Instagram.
A lot of our customer building is taking place on sites like Reddit where the local community is extremely supportive. They know us now, and you see posts that say, ‘I’m moving into Wilmington for work. Where should I live?’ I’ll say, Hey, I’m the local bookstore. I want to encourage you to come live downtown on Market Street. There are lots of great bars, restaurants, and a great local bookstore. And they’re grateful I responded.”
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