Lantern Library is an independent bookshop with a café, a reading room and a loyal crowd who’d follow it anywhere, which is lucky, because online shopping has been eating into its trade for years. The owner wanted to compete on personality rather than price. We ran the channels for a year, built a staff-picks format that became the shop’s signature, and then trained the booksellers to take it over themselves.
Event ticket sales
+118% in a year
Online orders from social
+74% year on year
Staff-picks video views
920K in 12 months
Booksellers trained
9 staff
The owner was blunt: the shop couldn’t out-discount the internet, so it had to out-charm it. The brief was to grow event ticket sales, which were the healthiest part of the business, nudge regulars towards the shop’s own online ordering, and do it all in a way the team could eventually run without an agency, because the budget wouldn’t stretch forever.
Priya built the content around the booksellers, each of whom has strong opinions and a favourite shelf. The staff-picks format was deliberately simple: one bookseller, one book, ninety seconds and no script. We added author-event trailers, a monthly reading-room livestream and a reply-every-comment policy. In month ten we began handing over, running training sessions for the nine staff with templates and a posting rota.
Event tickets more than doubled over the year, with several readings selling out within a day of the trailer going live. Online orders from social rose by nearly three quarters, and the staff-picks videos drew close to a million views, an absurd number for a bookshop with one shopfront. The team now runs the channels themselves and we check in each quarter.
We’re booksellers, not marketers, and Lido respected that. They built something that worked, then taught us to carry on without them, which is not what we expected an agency to do.
- Ruth Adeyemi, Owner, Lantern Library
Independent shop with more character than budget? We’ll help you put it online, then teach your team to keep it going. Drop us a line at hello@lido.example.