Surviving COVID:

How Toronto’s TYPE Books kept their customers reading through the Pandemic

The urge to shop locally has skyrocketed in the recent years. It seems there has been a call to action—evident, perhaps, on the faces (quite literally) of all the people who chose to purchase handmade masks instead of disposable ones and the increased holiday shopping at local retailers. (1) But once lockdowns began, small businesses found themselves struggling to stay open. For some, the solution was to move to curbside pickup and delivery.
Shopping online is not a new concept, and it would be fair to say that many customers are happy to shop for their favourite products without having to leave their home. For introverts, this grants the additional benefit of fewer human interactions. But some things lose their luster in the switch from a brick-and-mortar experience to a virtual one, and book shopping is definitely one of them.
For the dedicated browser, there is no greater feeling than walking into a bookstore, looking at all the gorgeous covers, and perusing the jacket copy. The old saying about not judging a book by its cover is put to the test, especially for online shoppers who only see a small thumbnail image of the cover. Perhaps the best part of book-shopping is talking with people who enjoy books as much as you do and getting their personal recommendations. At independent bookstores, that personalized experience is important to their customers, so how do booksellers provide this service during a lockdown?
I sat down (virtually, of course) with Kyle Buckley, manager of TYPE Books’ Queen Street location, to discuss the obstacles that independent bookstores faced during the pandemic.*

Krysta Belcourt: Would you mind starting out by telling me a bit about the history of TYPE Books and your role there?

Kyle Buckley: We are an independent bookstore in Toronto, Ontario, and we are fifteen years old this year. We now have three brick-and-mortar stores, and I'm talking to you today from our Queen Street store, which is our very first store. I have worked at TYPE for pretty much all of those fifteen years.

Disclaimer: From here on, Krysta Belcourt, interviewing for The Ampersand Review, will be referred to as AR.

AR: What sort of challenges did TYPE Books encounter during the pandemic?

KB: The major challenge was that we had to close our doors. That happened, of course, more than once during the pandemic when there were lockdown measures in place for retail spaces. That meant we did not have customers in our stores, which is not something we had ever encountered before. It’s not something we had ever really imagined happening.
There were other things, as well. Getting information was a real challenge throughout the pandemic. Customers would have questions like, “oh, when do you think you’ll open back up?” or, “when will certain restrictions change or when?” And we didn’t know any more than other citizens knew. We were getting our information from watching the news conferences just like everyone else. That’s when you rely on things like having great relationships with your neighbours—businesses that we have been next to for years. You combine your knowledge, you get together, and you discuss what you’ve heard, what you know, and what we think the best ways forward will be.

AR: Were there times when you couldn't operate at all, or were you able to provide delivery and curbside pickup throughout the whole pandemic?

KB: Thankfully, we were able to avoid a situation where we weren't able to operate at all. So even on the very first day that we closed our doors—which was in March 2020—when we had no idea what the future would bring and what everything would entail, we were able to at least provide curbside, contact-free pick up. Right away, we had people calling us and we were selling books over the phone. Quickly, we were able to get some protocols in place to be able to do deliveries in Toronto.
Then we got our online operations—we have an online store that started during the pandemic. Our online store is our 4th store really—that's TYPEbooks.ca. We have a curated selection of products. In the early days of the pandemic, we were just taking peoples’ addresses and delivering things on our own if we could, working really hard to try to make sure that we weren't leaving any of our customers or our community behind. But then our online store made that a lot easier for us.

AR: Now that the stores are back open for customer shopping have you found that more people are still preferring to shop online, or are you finding that the online sales have slowed down because people can come back in store now?

KB: There is a balance, but by-and-large we do most of our sales in person. When you're shopping for books, it's best to be able to be in a store and look at the back-cover copy of a book, look through it, and get recommendations from people who are working there, and who you may or may not already have relationships with. But there is still a balance—our online store will always be part of our business now.

AR: Did you find yourselves making any other changes to accommodate customers during lockdown, or were there any other initiatives that you brought into play?

KB: A huge change for us too was the way we used social media. When things were unsure, we wanted to let people know they could still call and make purchases over the phone, and that we can provide curbside pickup and deliveries. So, we started using Instagram with frequency on a map that we had never done before. We started posting as much information as we could, and we made lots of videos. I think in our stores, we really feel like we're part of the communities that we’re in, and we were able to keep those connections because of social media.

AR: Speaking of social media, can you tell me a bit about the process of navigating from doing those in-person events to all virtual events? How did that go? Were there challenges?

KB: The challenges were largely that I'm not a particularly technologically savvy person. There are simple things to figure out, like how to do an event over Instagram Live or Zoom. And yes, we certainly stopped doing any in-person events. It was a pleasant surprise to be able to do some of the things we would be doing otherwise just as virtual events, because there's pluses and minuses to virtual events.
The minuses are that you lose out on the interpersonal aspect of things: everyone getting together in the same space and you're part of a live event, the questions and engagement from the audience is different—and if you're interviewing an author, or if an author’s reading from their book, it always seems to have a different energy when it's live and there are people there. It's always nice to be able to get people into our stores, which are just really nice spaces to be in, and that all adds to the overall quality of a literary event.
At the same time, some of the pluses were that we could reach out to authors that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do an event with at all. One of my favorite virtual events we did during the pandemic—we reached out to an author named Lucie Elven, who's a writer in the UK. We were able to do an Instagram Live event with her. It's not as if we would have, in other times, been able to say, “hey, we’ll fly you to Toronto and come and do a reading in our little store.” So, this was a terrific thing that we realized. Our scope is larger if we think about events virtually because it means that you can reach out to authors or writers anywhere, which I really do think is genuinely exciting.

AR: Do you think in the future you'll continue to do those virtual events, or a balance between the two?

KB: Yeah, I think that I would love for there to be a time when we're participating in in-person events again, whether that's in our stores or in other spaces. I also think that there's advantages to virtual events, and it can be accessible to a whole lot of people. I’d love for us first to maintain a balance of both of those things going forward.

AR: You talked a little bit about the benefit of being able to have events in the store, especially for literary events where it just sets the environment. Obviously, that is part of the appeal of independent bookstores—the in-store experience of being in there and getting the customized service. So, looking forward, do you think that there's a way that independent bookstores can offer something virtually to substitute that in-store experience?

KB: I think the answer is yes and no. One of the things that we try to do—which I think is working well for us—is curate our online store. Our stores are all different from each other because they respond directly to the neighborhoods and the communities that they're in. So, we tried to curate an online store with all the same amount of care as we know we do in our actual stores. That said, I love selling books to people—talking to people about books that we both read and making recommendations—I love everything in that kind of exchange. There's nothing virtually, as of yet, that's been a way to substitute for that. But who knows, maybe that is what the future might bring, but I'll always love the in-store shopping experience.

AR: Nothing beats walking into a store and looking at all the covers and being able to talk to someone else about books that you love. That desire to provide that curated experience, is that where the mystery bags originated from? How did that come about?

KB: Absolutely, and that's been one of the most fun and interesting things for us during the whole pandemic—is doing these mystery bags for people. That came about from trying to find a way to satisfy our regular customers, who we already knew what they liked or didn't like. They would come in and just be like, “okay, what's new that you think I might be interested in?” And then being like, “oh absolutely, I saw a couple of things just last week that for sure would interest you. Take a look at this and this and that.”
When we weren't able to do that, because we weren't able to have customers in the store, the mystery bag became a really great solution because people could just tell us what they liked and what they didn't like. There is a little questionnaire that we have on our website that can be filled out, or we can do it a little more informally over the phone. It's great because there is the element of mystery and surprise to it—you don't know what it is exactly you’re going to get, but it's also not random. These are picked with your interests, your reading history, and your likes and dislikes in mind.

AR: Have you found it to be a big hit with customers?

KB: We've had a great response from it, and we love doing it. It's a lot of fun because you just have to imagine yourself into a customer’s life—what do I think they would really, really, want? You can't know for sure—it's a bit of a guessing game. But also, you’re solving a mystery in a sense.

AR: Almost like trying to buy a Christmas gift for a friend—trying to find the best thing that they're going to enjoy.

KB: Yeah, and that’s the exciting part about gift-giving, right? Gift giving is trying to figure out what would really excite, or just interest, or delight someone, and that's what we get to do when we put together these mystery bags.

AR: Have you noticed any changes in customer shopping trends over the past couple of years, with either how they're preferring to shop or the specific products that they're buying?

KB: We've certainly noticed different things at different times. In the early days of the pandemic, we started selling a whole lot more jigsaw puzzles than we had ever sold before. The same thing with books about how to make sourdough bread. Because these were the funny trends that really picked up, especially during the early days of the pandemic. Even though these are private activities that people were doing in their own homes, because they weren’t out socializing, there was a communal aspect to it, in a sense, that everyone was doing these things at the same time. I don't know if that's a lasting or concrete change, but it was an interesting and fun moment for us when it happened. All of a sudden, we were making videos on Instagram about all the new puzzles we would get in, and the next day, as soon as we opened the store, the phones would be ringing with everyone just wanting the puzzles they had seen on Instagram.
At different times too during the pandemic we realized that the big titles, like the writers and books that people already knew about, were selling en masse a lot more. It was a lot harder to sell the more niche books and books that might be more interesting to us. Maybe they’re from smaller presses, maybe they're just from authors that someone at the store really loves, but an author that isn't necessarily as well known. It became a lot harder to sell books like that because that relies so much on our relationships with our customers. So, if someone who works at one of our stores knows a customer a little bit when they come in, they can say, “this is an author I really like, you’ve maybe never heard of this writer, but I really love this person’s books and I think they’ll appeal to you.” You can show them the books, you can put them in their hands. So that was harder to do whenever we were in full lockdown.

AR: So now that you're back open and things are starting to return to some semblance of normal, have you found new challenges with the supply chain shortages? Has that affected you, both with book printing and the cargo ship issues?

KB: The one thing about all these issues around the supply chain is that, at least this was a situation that there's been a lot of discussion about, so it was on our radar nice and early. What we've done is—really early—we launched into all of our Christmas holiday season ordering and buying. So, we're doing everything we can to just be ahead of any supply chain problems that could come. There are still going to be some things that happen. There's going to be books that the print run of which might sell out in early December or in late November, and are simply not going to be reprinted again until sometime well into the next year. So, we figured the best thing for us to do is just be as proactive as possible and let everyone know that they can shop as early as they like and that we're ready for it.

AR: What initiatives, specific to TYPE Books, are you most excited about that have come about in the past couple of years?

KB: The initiative that I’m the most excited about overall is the fact that we were able, through whatever means—whether it was over social media like on Instagram, or through different things we came up with like our mystery bags—to just find a way to make our outreach be as personality-based as possible. Everyone at our store participates in our Instagram account. Last year during December—and it's something that we're hoping to continue again this year—every day, we would post a new video of one of our staff members picking a book of the day. We talk about it for about a minute and then we post it on our Instagram account. It's great because it's the amazing personalities of the people who work here at the store. It's easy to think of virtual things as cold and impersonal, so it’s been exciting for us to try and be as personality-based and as much ourselves as we can be, even when we're reaching out over social media.

*This interview has been edited for length.

1 | Recent data from Twitter Canada found that 40 percent of Canadians on Twitter stated they would be more likely to shop locally for the holidays. Read more about the data in this Retail Insider article: https://retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2021/11/canadian-consumers-intend-to-support-local-businesses-ahead-of-december-holidays-interview/

KRYSTA BELCOURT

is the Editorial Intern for The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. She currently resides in Muskoka, living the small-town, cottage country life and using all of her free time to read as many books as she can. She is currently working towards her degree in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College in Mississauga.