Toronto-based personalized children’s book company SundayFawn is preparing to expand into physical retail with a model designed to let stores sell customized books without carrying finished-book inventory.
The company is developing self-serve retail displays built around what it calls a Story Pass. Customers purchase the pass at a retailer’s point of sale, then visit SundayFawn’s website to create a personalized children’s book at home. SundayFawn handles the customization, printing, shipping and customer service after the initial retail transaction.
Co-Founder Dom Calabrigo said SundayFawn is currently working toward its first hospital installations and has letters of intent and contracts connected with several hospital opportunities. The company is also speaking with larger retailers as it looks to prove the concept before pursuing a wider rollout.
“We’re just kind of starting the retail program” Calabrigo said in an interview with Retail Insider. “We’ve been a B2C business from day one, but we said, you know what, there’s a good opportunity here to get some traffic in physical stores with a low risk.”
The goal is ambitious. Calabrigo said SundayFawn wants to reach more than 200 retail locations within the next 12 months if early pilots validate the model.
“I think ideally our goal is aggressive,” he said. “We want to be in 200-plus locations within 12 months.”
One Retail Product, Thousands of Possible Books
SundayFawn currently offers about 25 personalized book concepts aimed primarily at children between birth and age nine.
Customers can select themes ranging from birthdays and ABCs to dinosaurs and future careers. They can upload a child’s photograph, choose an illustration style and add information that shapes the story.
Calabrigo said the personalization process generally takes two to three minutes. About 80 per cent of customers complete the more detailed customization process, while roughly 20 per cent use a simpler option that allows SundayFawn to create much of the story for them.
That level of customization creates an obvious challenge for conventional retail.
A store cannot realistically carry finished inventory for every child, appearance, story theme and combination of personal details.
SundayFawn’s Story Pass is intended to remove that problem.
Stores would merchandise sample books alongside physical passes. A customer can handle and read examples, purchase a pass at the retailer’s checkout and then complete the customization online later.
“You can look at some sample books, then you’d grab a Story Pass, bring it to the cashier,” Calabrigo said. “It’s a nice physical gift.”
He said the pass is designed to feel more substantial than a conventional gift card, giving customers something tangible to bring to a baby shower, hospital visit or other gifting occasion.
The company has developed both larger floor displays and smaller countertop units, which could allow the program to operate across different store sizes and retail categories.
For the retailer, the important distinction is that the personalized merchandise is never actually sitting in the store.
SundayFawn Handles Fulfilment After the Sale
The Story Pass transaction is completed through the retailer’s existing point-of-sale system.
After purchase, the customer receives a code that can be redeemed through SundayFawn’s website. From that point, SundayFawn takes responsibility for manufacturing, shipping, customer service and replacements.
“We handle customer service, manufacturing, everything,” Calabrigo said.
The company says a completed book can reach the customer in approximately seven days.
SundayFawn currently prices softcover books at $59 and hardcover books at $85 in the markets discussed by Calabrigo. The hardcover product is a 38-page book positioned as a keepsake purchase.
Calabrigo said retail partners could earn a substantial percentage per Story Pass sold, depending on volume and the commercial arrangement.
That revenue-per-sale proposition is an important part of SundayFawn’s pitch.
Because the retailer is not purchasing finished books, Calabrigo argues that stores can test the concept with relatively little capital committed to inventory. SundayFawn supplies the display and sample product.
“We set up everything,” he said. “We give you the display, the books. There’s no inventory.”
He said a location selling only three or four books per month could potentially generate enough revenue to justify the floor or counter space. SundayFawn also believes the sales productivity could compare favourably with other gift merchandise, although the model is still at the pilot stage and has not yet produced a long operating history in physical retail.
The challenge is less about whether SundayFawn can manufacture a personalized book and more about whether a shopper walking past a display can understand the proposition quickly enough to purchase one.
“Our job is to make sure when someone walks by a display that you fully understand it within 10 seconds,” Calabrigo said.
Hospitals Are an Early Retail Target
Hospital gift shops are one of SundayFawn’s first target channels.
The rationale is closely connected with the occasion behind the purchase. New babies bring grandparents, relatives and friends into hospitals looking for gifts, while the personalized book provides an alternative to clothing, toys and other common newborn merchandise.
Calabrigo said the company has been working through Purchasing Power Plus as it develops hospital pilot opportunities.
“We should be in hospitals because, you know, when a baby’s born, what’s the best way to give a gift?” he said.
SundayFawn expects its first hospital installation to be operational shortly as manufacturing of its displays progresses. At the time of the September 23 interview, Calabrigo said the company was roughly a month away from getting its first hospital location running.
Early retailer interest has been encouraging but remains limited in scale. Calabrigo said two of the first three organizations SundayFawn met with wanted to pursue a pilot.
Bookstores, baby retailers, gift shops and other locations built around occasion-based purchases could represent further opportunities if the initial format works.
Canadian Company With U.S. and U.K. Focus
SundayFawn is a Canadian company and Calabrigo is based in Toronto, although much of its business to date has been concentrated in the United States and United Kingdom.
Canada currently accounts for about 10 per cent of book sales, according to Calabrigo.
“We’re a Canadian company, actually. I’m based in Toronto myself,” he said. “But predominantly we’re in the U.S. and the U.K.”
The company has production capacity serving Canadian customers from Ontario and Manitoba. Calabrigo said books for eastern markets are produced in the Kitchener, Ont. area, while another operation in Manitoba helps serve western provinces.
Shipping costs are one reason Canada has been a more challenging market.
Calabrigo said a book can be shipped to many U.S. customers for approximately $5, while Canadian shipping can cost between about $10 and $18 depending on the order.
That can push the final Canadian purchase toward the $100 level, creating a different pricing equation from the U.S. market.
Despite that challenge, SundayFawn is pursuing Canadian retail opportunities. Calabrigo said an associate has been working to establish contact with a major Canadian bookstore retailer, although he did not identify the company.
“Canada is definitely a big market that we want to attack,” he said.
Physical Retail Becomes a Discovery Channel
The larger retail idea behind Story Pass is that stores do not necessarily need to stock the product a customer ultimately receives.
For SundayFawn, the store performs several other functions.
It puts the brand in front of shoppers who may never encounter it online. It allows customers to pick up and examine a finished book before buying. It gives gift buyers something physical to take away from the store. It also lets SundayFawn use retailers as distribution points for Story Passes without shipping individual physical gift packages itself.
The actual complexity remains with SundayFawn.
Calabrigo described the concept as a way of “bridging that physical to virtual kind of space.”
That separation between the in-store transaction and post-purchase production could have implications beyond personalized books if the concept proves successful.
Calabrigo said SundayFawn remains focused on children’s books, although the company has experimented with other concepts, including pet books.
“I think there’s an interesting dynamic to kind of bridge the physical and digital world,” he said.
For now, the more immediate test is whether customers encountering a sample book in a hospital gift shop or another retail environment will understand the Story Pass quickly, pay for it at checkout and complete the personalization later.
If they do, the company could have a path into hundreds of stores without building the inventory infrastructure normally associated with a national retail rollout.
That makes the first pilots important. SundayFawn has already demonstrated that it can sell personalized books online. Its next challenge is determining whether a physical store can become an effective front door for a product that does not exist until after the customer has paid for it.
