Best Sellers opens 2nd Waikiki shop
Advertiser Staff
Local bookstore operator Best Sellers Hawai'i Ltd. will open its fifth store in six years this morning but the inventory this time will center around Hawaiian CDs, Hawaiian videos, Hawaiian music books and general-interest DVDs aimed at tourists for their long flights home.
RIchard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
The 600-square-foot store is just footsteps away from Best Sellers' bookstore in the Hilton Hawaiian Village and represents a new idea in niche marketing for Brian Melzack, the company's chairman and CEO.
Brian Melzack, chairman and chief executive officer of Best Sellers, gets ready for the opening of his second Waikiki store at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The new shop will concentrate on Hawaiian entertainment.
The original store at the Hilton Hawaiian Village carries just three shelves of Hawaiian CDs, a mere 60 linear feet. But the CD sales represent 30 percent of the business, Melzack said. (Hawaiiana books represent 50 to 60 percent of sales).
Best Sellers has two stores at Honolulu Airport and one downtown.
Melzack said that because Best Sellers will have Waikiki's only bookstores, he doesn't worry about losing business to the big chain book dealers at the shopping malls.
The company — whose biggest store is the 3,800-square-foot site downtown — is dwarfed by national competitors such as 50,000-square-foot Borders Books and Music but has used niche marketing to slowly become the largest independent bookstore operator in the state.
