Photo / Courtesy Central Maine Growth Council
Oliver & Friends Bookshop is in a ground-floor leased space at Main Street Commons, a Colby College residential facility at 150 Main St.
Updated: July 29, 2024
Bookshop finds energy in downtown Waterville's arts and culture scene
Photo / Courtesy Oliver & Friends Bookshop
Renee Cunningham moved Oliver & Friends Bookshop to Waterville to build year-round sales.
The owner of a bookstore that started in Belgrade during the pandemic is finding new energy with its move to downtown Waterville.
Renee Cunningham recently moved Oliver & Friends Bookshop into a ground-floor leased space at Main Street Commons, a Colby College residential facility at 150 Main St. The planned move was announced in February.
“I talked with Colby and they had a space that could be built to spec,” said Cunningham. “It was a great spot right on Main Street. It seemed like a pretty easy thing to say yes to.”
Cunningham also recently received $10,000 from American Express and Main Street America’s Backing Small Businesses Grant Program.
She plans to use the money to increase her inventory and replace some of her older fixtures.
“This investment highlights the critical importance of fostering local retail businesses on Main Street,” said Garvan Donegan, Central Maine Growth Council’s director of planning, innovation and economic development. “By channeling resources into downtown Waterville, the community is enhancing economic activity, driving sustained economic growth, and improving the quality of life for residents and visitors alike."
Pandemic startup
Cunningham previously worked in the human resources field. In Maine, she was a recruiter for United Cerebral Palsy of Maine and with a social service organization called Living Innovations.
She decided on a career change.
“I always had a yearning to be an entrepreneur and, specifically, to take my passion for reading and make a career out of it,” she said. “I loved how I felt when I walked into bookshops.”
She was waiting for the “right” time to make the change. Eventually she asked herself, “’When will the time ever be 100% right?’ It just got to the point when it was now or never.”
In 2019, she started to research the feasibility of opening a bookstore and found the retail sector was not only surviving but thriving. She secured space in downtown Belgrade at 87 Main St. Her intention was to host a grand opening in June 2020.
Photo / Courtesy Oliver & Friends Bookshop
A $10,000 American Express and Main Street America’s Backing Small Businesses grant will help build inventory at the shop.
“I knew it would be a challenge to open a small business, in particular a small independent bookstore,” she said. “But the uphill battle was more than I ever thought.”
One challenge, she said, was that she didn’t qualify for pandemic relief assistance because programs required businesses to show a loss of sales and hers had just started.
“So we had we had to buckle in and be a scrappy startup,” she said.
Like many retailers, she managed her inventory and cash flow conservatively and offered curbside pickup, followed by capacity limitations when stores were allowed to begin bringing customers inside. Word of her shop got around through social media.
She financed the startup with personal funds and a small business loan secured just before the shutdown. The store is named after one of her rescue cats, himself named after Oliver Twist.
Year-round sustainability
The Belgrade location was great the first few years.
“It’s a classic tourist village with other little shops” and a thriving summer economy, she said.
Once the world opened up again, she found she was hitting her sales projections for the summer and fall, and even through the December holiday season. The store was open all year but had greatly reduced hours from January to May.
Her goal was to be sustainable year-round.
“After a couple of years, I found that winters weren’t getting where I needed them to be,” she said.
About a year ago, she started to explore a move.
She looked at other places, including in Gardiner and Augusta.
Waterville was closest to her home in Belgrade. And she said she liked the potential synergy with other arts and cultural offering that have blossomed there in recent years, including the Schupf Arts Center, a partnership between Colby College and Waterville Creates
An advantage of 150 Main St. was that she could design the interior from scratch. Matthew Winch of Garrison Consulting in Portland was her architect. Scarborough-based Landry/French Construction, which built the Schupf Arts Center and other Waterville projects, was the contractor.
Interior construction was financed through a personal loan. The design aesthetic is a “cozy cottage feel.”
A year ago, the shop had two part-time, seasonal employees. Now Cunningham has three part-time employees and plans to be open year-round with regular hours, with a goal to expand to six days a way by this fall.
“I’m really optimistic that business will be a lot more steady and much more consistent year-round,” she said.
Not many years ago, the fate of bookshops seemed to hang in the balance in the digital age.
“We are definitely alive and well and there are more of us popping up all around,” said Cunningham.
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