A customer at MiJa Books’ brick-and-mortar store pulled Stephanie Moran Reed aside with an invitation: Come sell at our school. That two-hour back-to-school night outsold roughly a month of retail, and it redirected the entire company.
Stephanie and Muammar Reed started MiJa Books after they couldn’t find books for their daughter that featured characters like herself: biracial, part Mexican and part Black, bilingual, with textured hair. The business is now approaching seven figures, with school book fairs carrying 50% to 60% of revenue. Getting there meant reading the unit economics of four different channels, then engineering the winner up to a hard $5,000 minimum.
Here, both founders break down the acquisition math behind that choice, the two variables that raised their average fare, the margin floor that decides which schools they say yes to, and what happened when demand outran the operation.
On the PTA invitation that outsold a month of retail:
Stephanie: We operated a brick-and-mortar bookstore from November 2021 through January 2023. One of our customers who walked into the store happened to be part of a PTA at a local school. She brought me to the side and said, “Would you come to our school?”
That had never crossed my mind. I said, “Sure, why not?” We do pop-ups, right? It’d be essentially the same thing, just having it on a school campus. It was for an open house, back-to-school night event.
We ended up selling more in two hours than we did in about an entire month at the brick-and-mortar.
On the gap between a $25 order and a $5,000 one:
Stephanie: Selling just D2C [direct to consumer], the average order was between $25 and $30. When we started the book fairs, we were still trying to figure out logistically how those would be more profitable for us. In the last year, we’ve been able to shift a few things around to where now our average book fair makes almost $5,000 in gross sales.
So right between $25, $30 to a $5,000 product, essentially, right? That really shifted the mindset for us and said, Well, it looks like we’re focusing on book fairs now. That was a pretty easy decision to make.
Muammar: Our book fairs are probably 50% to 60% of our revenue. Our POs, which come through our website, are probably 30%, and then maybe another 10% from online sales, which are also online book fairs through Shopify. So even our Shopify sales that look like individual D2C transactions are actually online school book fairs.
On why a $100 conversion costs too much on a $30 book:
Muammar: It’s really hard to have a successful business if your LTV to CAC numbers just don’t work. You could be working as hard as it’s humanly possible to work, but if your unit economics are off, your business is gonna be crap.
If our average book price is $20 to $30, it’s hard to convert a customer on Meta for less than 20 to 30 bucks. There goes all your margin. But if our gross revenue from a book fair on average is $5,000, I can spend more to acquire that client. A $100 conversion cost on Meta still might be profitable. A $100 conversion cost on a $30 item, you’re underwater. Your business is gonna close.
That’s why we’ve been focusing, at least up to about a million, on the more profitable channel. And our B2B is a wild mix, because it leads to D2C at the fairs. Someone punches in their information at the fair, or they click our pop-up for the 10% discount, and then when we send them a newsletter they buy later. But then I don’t have to acquire them or pay a cost.
On the two variables that moved their average book fair:
Stephanie: It kind of started with the pop-up philosophy, because with pop-ups it’s usually a few hours, and sometimes for the longer festival types you’re there almost the whole day. So when we started doing school events, I was just like, oh, it’s the same as the pop-up. We’re there for a few hours, we leave.
Then we had schools asking, hey, can we sell for one day, two days, three days? And sure, right? I thought that would convert to more sales. What we found is that the sweet spot to hit that average of $5,000 per fair is schools have to sell for at least five days straight. That’s pretty much the standard when schools host book fairs with our competitors—they’re used to five days. Even at four days, we don’t really hit that mark. It’s usually that fifth day that boosts the numbers about 20%.
The second biggest change was focusing on the enrollment number. On the low end, the elementary schools we worked with were between 100 and 150 students. We learned that schools with enrollment over 450 students got us closer to that $5,000 average. So now we send different agreements out to schools depending on their enrollment number alone. We had to find that out the hard way, by working with as many schools as wanted to work with us initially.
On setting a revenue floor instead of chasing volume:
Stephanie: We were looking at the labor that goes into packing our book fairs, the delivery costs we have, and then the inventory costs. There’s not much control we have over the cost of books, because it’s the market rate, essentially. That’s one of the biggest constraints we have to be mindful of when we’re looking at our profit numbers.
Last season, our profit margin was around 35% at that $5,000 mark. Anything below that, we’re either breaking even or losing money if we don’t hit the mark. So just looking at raw data, we have to hit at least an average of $5,000 a fair in order for us to at least make a little bit of money here. It took a lot of fine-tuning, for sure.
On the customer-pleasing practice they had to kill to grow:
Muammar: There was at one point where the fulfillment was our garage. And I was happy, and she was going crazy.
Stephanie: Bursting at the seams. So we operate out of a warehouse now, and I’m still trying to streamline that. For every season, an ideal situation would be that we have one catalog of inventory and every school book fair gets sent the identical inventory.
But how we were doing it initially, I was catering each book fair to the school, because we let them request special inventory based on their school demographic. Schools are like, “Oh, we have a population of Filipino students,” or “We have students that are Jewish,” or “Students that speak Korean.” And we would cater to every single school. For fulfillment, that’s a nightmare.
So we learned after a few seasons, I said, “OK, we can’t keep doing it this way if we want to grow this business.” We had to make it more of a cookie cutter model, sticking with the core inventory every single season, and anything outside the packed inventory we can send as an extra, as a bonus on the side.
That would mean at the beginning of every season, my warehouse staff can literally just pre-pack a few dozen fairs, depending on our calendar. The way it is now, we’re packing a couple of weeks or a week before the fair goes out, based on turnover of our inventory. If a school calls us last minute and wants to have a fair, I want to be able to say, “Oh, sure. We have X amount of pre-packed fairs on the shelf.”
On why 300 SKUs per fair rules out a 3PL:
Muammar: We haven’t really shopped around for 3PLs because of our intense SKU count, and because we are always changing the way that we’re packing fairs. I don’t think that we’re optimized enough to outsource that yet.
That’s my hypothesis. At least just from my limited knowledge, I feel that 3PLs are better for when you have hero SKUs. If I had a bundle that we knew we were selling thousands of and could be stocked, shoot, I might go into Amazon too. But we would need one, two, three, four, five hero products.
Stephanie: We send about 300 SKUs for every book fair. And we anticipate processing a return, because the schools not only bring back our inventory, they also bring back a lot of the supplies that we give them to put up the book fair. That’s not common for 3PLs to have to handle the known return.
On calling a reset year after their best year:
Muammar: Everyone wants to grow 100%, 200% a year. But when you have a lot of inventory in your business, especially if your COGS are around 40% or 50%, 100% or more growth means all of your profit is going to go back into inventory. You still need to pay taxes, so your cash flow is going to be hampered, and then it becomes a financing issue.
When you’re bootstrapped, 20% to 30% growth is great, and you can do that comfortably with good cash flow. If you’re going faster than that, you might break the business even though people want your product.
Stephanie: That growth year we had, it was 135% growth from the previous year. So we broke the business that last year. We had way more demand than we could service, which is a good thing and a bad thing, because you learn really quickly what is not working well.
I needed an opportunity to pause. At the same time, I personally was going through a really difficult time with a few different things. My mental health was at the lowest point in my life, really. Those two things combined were just chaos for me.
So this year is a reset, to take all that feedback we’ve gotten from our clients and realize what didn’t work and how to make it better. So that we can have a better business, and so that I can have more time for myself, and my daughter, and my family.
Stephanie and Muammar cover more on Shopify Masters, including the pipeline that turns one video into 10 pieces of content, the geotargeted ad he drops at education conferences, and why their most important hire is now seasonal instead of full-time.
