Chinaberry: Reinventing the Wheel

Keeping Up With Big Boxes

For instance, as much as small booksellers like Chinaberry have labored to keep up with big box retailers, marketers who sell compact discs also have struggled. “It’s tough to sell the music we offer in Isabella,” Fuller-Rowell points out, referring to the soothing and therapeutic CDs sold in the catalog by the likes of harpist Hilary Stagg and spiritual group B-Tribe. And there’s no getting around the fact that Isabella has to charge more. “So we put a message in the catalog explaining why we have to do this.” He notes that the messages have resulted in a lot of positive feedback from customers.