苏菲独立书店
Eight months after Nach Waxman opened up his Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a man from the neighborhood came inside, looked around, and said, “You’re still here? I told my wife you wouldn’t make it”
More than two decades later, Waxman’s homage to gastronomy is still making it. Devoted exclusively to selling books on all aspects of cooking, food, and wine, Kitchen Arts & Letters was considered an oddity when it opened for business in 1983. Today, it’s an even rarer creature: The successful independent bookseller.
DIFFERENTIATING TO COMPETE. At a time when many small, independent shops have closed for good, unable to compete with the online behemoths or supersize chain stores, Waxman has remained part of a resilient group of bibliophiles that adhered to their own retailing tactics and, in many cases, not only survived but also thrived. Like successful small businesses in a number of industries, Waxman used grassroots marketing and specialization to fend off bigger rivals.
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