The road to opening
It’s not as easy as unlocking the door. It’s also not as hard as daydreaming but never doing the rest of our lives.
Two years ago, I turned to my wife and said, “What if we opened a bookstore?” I started researching, learning about the book industry, marketing, and commercial real estate. We shared the idea in March of 2023 and began fundraising. Immediately, our community was abuzz. When are we opening? Where will we be located? Do we take donations? (Yes we do!) Two things became clear from the start:
This would be incredibly harder than I realized, both on the business side and on the social side.
Our community needs this desperately, direly.
We held a fundraiser and attended events, and the consensus every time was, “Melbourne needs this!”
In August of 2023, five months after the bookstore’s inception, a cisgender and heterosexual shopowner in California was murdered simply for flying a pride flag. We intended to do a whole lot more than fly a pride flag. This coupled with our personal circumstances (my wife and I had only just moved into our first very expensive apartment together in West Melbourne, twenty minutes from our intended location, and I didn’t even have a job) caused us to decide to go on hiatus. We decided to continue to promote events in the community, but we were going into hibernation.
We did things here and there, like forming the Moonstruck Society which held a fundraiser in support of Palestine, but the storefront idea was dead in the water.
Then, in January of 2025, I received a text from our friend Grace saying she had ideas for the Society. I took a moment to reevaluate our personal circumstances.
2 years older, 2 years more mature. We lived much closer to EGAD, our intended spot. I finally had a steady job that provided me experience working in a small business in the arts district. I realized the circumstances that caused us to pause had slowly been removed. The social unrest would still be an obstacle, but our personal situation had changed. Suddenly, the hibernation lifted, and we got to work.
Now, after three months of planning, events, fundraising, and feverish budgeting, we’ve hit our funding goal and are ready to take the next step. We have a showing set for Tuesday, and while the space isn’t on the EGAD main street, it’s looking good.
What are next steps? As soon as we sign the lease, it’s a big trip to Ikea which I’m sure I’ll document here, then two weeks of painting the walls, assembling bookshelves, grading and tagging used books, ordering new books and goodies, and putting the finishing touches on my dream. We’ll need all the help we can get, so if you think you’d like to volunteer, just DM us on Instagram. And as always, if you have books you’d like to donate, bring ‘em by Thrive Local EGAD at 1416 Highland Ave, Melbourne, FL 32935. We need at least 1000 used books to open, and we’re at around 700.
Thanks to all of our supporters for being there with us for the past two years. Your patience, kindness, and passion are what keeps us going.
See you soon!
