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Whimsical bookstore serious about selling

By Jim McCartney

To sell children's books, Wild Rumpus transforms itself into a children's book. There are live animals throughout the store and an environment to match.

The front door is actually a door-within-a-door, one for big people and one for small; an aquarium doubles as a bathroom mirror; and a shack with a rat cage installed in the creaky floor houses its scary books section.

Children's bookstore Wild Rumpus as
a door-within-a-door for tinier customers.

Yet as whimsical as owners Tom Braun and Collette Morgan have been in designing their store in Minneapolis, selling books is a serious business, especially in the age of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. They also feel that their innovative in-store design, combined with strong word-of-mouth advertising, has helped them overcome a small marketing budget, a lack of parking and a tricky location.

To be sure, since Wild Rumpus opened its doors in 1992 in a crowded urban neighborhood of south Minneapolis, the market share of independent booksellers has fallen nearly by half to 18% of books sold. A good chunk of that business has gone to the big chains, which now control nearly 30% of the total market, according to the American Booksellers Association, Tarrytown, N.Y.

Meanwhile, Internet retailers like Amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com, are grabbing an increasing share of the book market as well.

It hasn't been easy.

"Our sales were down in December for the first time since we opened -- it was kind of a slap in the face,'' Braun said. "The warm weather hurt us, and so did the Internet. It kind of woke us up.''

Given its quirky format, Braun can't see trying to replicate the store over and over again. In fact, Wild Rumpus was approached by Mall of America to open a store, but he and Morgan decided not to pursue it.

They fancy themselves as a kind of anti-megamall type of store -- some of their customers would likely have anxiety attacks in a place like the megamall in Bloomington, Minn.

"We're really committed to having just one store -- I don't see us expanding,'' Braun said.

And don't expect them to pop up on the Internet, either.

"We're a place, not a Website,'' he said. "We're a place where people can touch and feel and smell. You can't do that on the Internet.''

Rather than look to expansion or the Internet for their survival, Wild Rumpus has turned to the corporate market to boost its sales. For instance, Wild Rumpus worked with Health Partners, a health maintenance organization based in the Twin Cities, on its initiative to promote reading books to infants, and ended up selling 15,000 copies of a book called Funny Face as part of that effort. Braun said he is also selling books to various hospitals and clinics, which want to update their children's book libraries.

"It's a way to stay in business and compete,'' Braun said.

Braun estimates that about 20% of the Wild Rumpus' $620,000 in sales last year came from outside the bookstore through orders from corporate clients and others. Five years from now, Braun hopes to have sales in excess of $1 million, with 40% of that coming from business clientele, such as hospitals and clinics.

Wild Rumpus owner Morgan hopes that by pursuing the children's niche, her business can survive the onslaught of the book superstores and Internet retailers like Amazon.com.

Wild Rumpus offers a wide selection of books from small presses.

"They can't take the risks we can,'' Morgan said.

Wild Rumpus offers many more books from the small presses than the big Barnes & Noble stores, Morgan said. She estimates that a typical book superstore would have only half of the children's titles that are stocked at Wild Rumpus.

Nor can the big superstores match Wild Rumpus' intense local focus, she said. Wild Rumpus works hard on developing relationships with teachers, who get a 20% discount at the store. The store also offers numerous readings and special activities for its customers.

Probably its closest competition is the Red Balloon, a children's bookstore on Grand Avenue in St. Paul.

"We wondered what the effect of [the Wild Rumpus] would be when it opened,'' said Carol Erdahl, Red Balloon's co-owner.

"But we think of ourselves as complementary now. We refer people to the Wild Rumpus all the time.''

Given the onslaught from the superstores and the Internet, independent booksellers now tend to see each other as colleagues rather than as competitors.

But the key to the store -- and a reason it can exist in its own special niche -- is its unique environment, said Dean Ramos, a retail analyst with the Minneapolis office of George K. Baum & Co.

"It's a weird place -- that's what it's all about,'' Ramos said. "Otherwise, if you have to compete on price or size, it doesn't work.''

Customers know the Wild Rumpus is a different kind of store before they even walk through the door-within-a-door. Once inside, they're greeted by chickens and roosters (next to the chicken's cage is a display of books featuring a chicken on its cover, "Lottie's New Beach Towel'' by Petra Mathers). The ceiling splits open into a sky as you walk in, and then flows into a river, complete with kayak. An old shed is the storehouse of scary books, and it even has a plexiglass covered cage of rats in its floor and creaky boards as well.

The store houses a menagerie of Manx cats, doves, rats, chickens (who work for chicken feed, as Morgan points out), parakeets, lovebirds, and even a pheasant, a tarantula and a salamander.

In fact, although the bookstore gets its name from the "wild rumpus'' in Maurice Sendak's classic, "Where the Wild Things Are,'' it really gets its architectural theme from "The Salamander Room'' by Anne Mazer, Braun said. In that story, a boy transforms his bedroom to make his salamander feel at home -- eventually adding trees, frogs, birds and an open roof to accommodate his lizard friend.

"It doesn't scream 'Only for little children,' " Braun said. "There are mysteries in it -- things people didn't see before. We gets lots of families, and senior citizens come in regularly.''