Lunch at the social kitchen

I recently had lunch at Exclusive Books’ Social Kitchen & Bar with a black entrepreneur whom I have known for some years. The Social Kitchen is a mix of fine dining tagged onto a fabulous bookshop and, as you might imagine, the attention to detail in the bookshop spills over into the restaurant so that there is a great feeling of cutting edge design in a post-industrial environment.

The entrepreneur told me that he felt very comfortable in the restaurant and I asked him why. He has a Ph.D but has struck me as a fairly functional operator without any real literary flights of fancy. His reply rather surprised me. He said, firstly, that whether I liked it or not (and despite his urbanity), he really felt at home in a space that was at once European and African. I took a closer look at my surroundings for the first time and I noted, that indeed, he was right: more than half the customers were black. Still more noticeably, however, they did not look or behave or resemble the popular image we have for the new rich in our country. In other words, there was no bling around. These were just people coming for a good meal. And this brought me to the topic that I had really wanted to discuss with him: what do we need to do to be more attractive, more accessible to black readers. There is no question in my mind that black people are reading more. I also see, on weekends when I visit our stores, that black families shop for books with a kind of unspoken message that everyone should get a book. So I see more and more black children lying on our banquettes or bean-bags reading and being read to. This has to be one of the best things for me in our business. A new generation of readers.

But this is not the only pleasing aspect: we are also seeing increasing numbers of young people, black and white, using our new design stores and the seating that we provide to come and work on their laptops or simply to hang out. This gets to the very essence of what we want to be: a destination not a bookshop.

Interestingly, it is our new look stores, the ones where we have tried to be ahead of the envelope, that most attract the young and, what is for us, a new and exciting market. When there were disruptions at the Universities last year, we noticed a huge influx of young people coming into our stores to sit and work. That is really what Exclusive Books should be: a refuge, an oasis of peace. However, it is also worth noting that whether the store is brand new or it is an older outlet, one thing is for certain: when someone in a Mall feels unsafe or insecure, where is the first place they go: the Exclusive Books bookshop, if there is one in the Mall. Bookshops, I think worldwide, are seen as sanctuaries and it pleases me enormously. There is no question that in developing our appeal for new consumers and new markets, we need to make sure that we curate our inventory accordingly. This means that our sections on African fiction and non-fiction need to be constantly extended and remodelled to offer the range and accessibility that this market wants.

We are hard at work doing this.

Benjamin Trisk,
CEO Exclusive Books