Joseph-Beth Opens Shops at Cleveland Clinic

Joseph-Beth Booksellers, with locations in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, recently opened a new store on the main campus of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. This week, a second, satellite store, is set to open at one of the Cleveland Clinic health centers. Co-owner Neil Van Uum described the arrangement as a way to "go after more predictive sales, instead of waiting for people to walk in the door."

Van Uum explained: "We wanted to get into growing areas, and education and health care are both growing. We're already involved in schools and book fairs. Now we're mining different opportunities to get involved in the health community and hospitals. We talked with Cleveland Clinic, and now we've got a couple of hospital gift shops in our family of stores."

In addition to its main campus, the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's largest, busiest healthcare centers and ranked one of America's top hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, has various health centers in surrounding communities.

The 5,500-square-foot Joseph-Beth store on the main campus opened on November 23. The 500-square-foot satellite store, which is taking over the space of a previous gift shop at another Cleveland Clinic center, is scheduled to open on Friday, December 4.

Van Uum reported that the larger store was meeting projections, but that he would need time to gauge how the store is faring after the initial opening buzz and holiday season are over. "We're still evaluating. We won't know how well it's doing until after the New Year." If the store is successful, he said that he would consider opening similar stores.

Both stores at the Cleveland Clinic will carry approximately 15 to 20 percent books and magazines and 80 to 85 percent gift items and will be staffed by Joseph-Beth booksellers. "They're fully owned stores," said Van Uum. "We run them. All eyes are on [the main] store. They'll be getting a lot of support from our service center."

Noting that "they're really gift shops," he explained: "It's led us into all sorts of avenues we'd never delved into before, like jewelry, snacks, pajamas. There are lots of different components, which creates its own challenges."

Van Uum said that the new stores aim to provide patients and their visitors with "learning, entertainment, spiritual, and inspirational value primarily through books and activity-based sidelines." To find the right title mix, staff will mine Joseph-Beth's vast database for "highly saleable titles" and swap inventory that doesn't work for the location.

Van Uum is taking a wait-and-see approach to their new business model. "The jury's still out to see how it does," he said. "Maybe there's a reason most hospital gift shops don't carry books, but I've traveled a lot and I've never seen what we're doing in terms of scope and breadth of inventory. We've built a beautiful store, and I'm extremely proud, but it always comes down to sales. --Karen Schechner