Live from New Orleans: Selling Cookbooks With The Personal Touch

The Kitchen Witch bookstore, a French Quarter shop that sells new, used and rare cookbooks, doesn’t have a loyalty program. Its woefully underpowered computer can’t coordinate e-mail campaigns. Plans to make its Web site (http://www.kwcookbooks.com) more e-commerce friendly has been on hold since August: The site’s Webmistress has not been heard from since Hurricane Katrina struck.

What Kitchen Witch has is the encyclopedic knowledge and raw enthusiasm of co-founder Philipe LaMancusa, who can walk through the store, pulling books off shelves at random and telling stories about the book itself, or its various editions, or anecdotes about the author. It also has the delightful zaniness, boundless energy and southern charm of co-founder Debbie Lindsey, who writes personal thank-you notes to every customer whose address she can snag.

Kitchen Witch’s current incarnation – LaMancusa ran an initial foray in New Orleans between 1999 and 2002 – was one of the first businesses to apply for a license within New Orleans when the city re-opened after Katrina.

“We are part of the reconstruction of the city,” LaMancusa said. “That is what we are here for.”

Philipe LaMancusa and Debbie Lindsey, co-founders of Kitchen Witch, a New Orleans cookbook shop.

(Photographs by Richard H. Levey)

They almost weren’t. The couple stayed in the French Quarter for six days after the hurricane hit. On the seventh, “We ran out of wine and we had to steal a car. It was time to go,” said Lindsey.

Not quite. By the sixth day after Katrina made landfall, electricity and water supplies in the Quarter were nonexistent. LaMancusa and Lindsey loaded a car belonging to the sister of a friend with themselves, a few possessions, seven animals – two dogs and three cats they own, one dog they were sitting for and a local stray they had adopted after the storm – and the friend himself, who didn’t drive.

Their plan was to go to San Francisco, where LaMancusa, who for the past 41 years had worked as a chef all over America, had enough contacts that getting a job would be easy.

“I always wanted to move to San Francisco,” Lindsey said. “We’d been talking about it. Be careful what you wish for. Philipe knew people, and missed it, to a degree. So we were like ‘all right, let’s do it!' But when we were within a mile of crossing the city line, driving into the city proper, their jazz radio station played ‘Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans.’”

“We just lost it,” LaMancusa added.

The moment New Orleans began to allow residents to return, Lindsey and LaMancusa knew they would return. When LaMancusa entered his apartment, and saw his collections of 5,000 cookbooks, 2,500 vinyl records, and 2,000 cassettes were relatively unscathed, he decided to re-launch Kitchen Witch.

The day they went to City Hall to sign the lease, there were no people in the streets. “It was probably the quietest day I’d seen, and I said ‘Oh, great, we’re opening a business and there is nobody here!’” said Lindsey.

Kitchen Witch co-founder Debbie Lindsey.

The new Kitchen Witch opened the day after Thanksgiving. Walk-in traffic has been decent, primarily because as residents return to their homes, they seek to replace books destroyed by the storm.

“If you figure that 70% of the city was destroyed, then you’ve got to figure that 70% of the books in the city were destroyed,” LaMancusa said. “Thankfully there are copies around of all of these books, but every person who had a personal book on their shelf that was in those devastated areas, those books are gone. One woman worked with Paul Prudhomme for 14 years and had a first edition of every one of his cookbooks signed to her by him. She had 10 feet of water for 12 days. When she got back, they were sludge.”

But there are also customers looking to expand their cooking repertoire. “The people that buy books here are not buying books to put on their shelf,” LaMancusa said. “They want to use these books. These people want these books because they are jazzed about something about them. And if they’re not jazzed about them, I can tell them something that will get them jazzed.”

Philipe LaMancusa holding a copy of “The Yul Brynner Cookbook”.

While both founders come from the food industry – Lindsey has split her time in New Orleans between waitressing and writing for various local publications – neither are especially versed in running a business.

“The biggest problem with a small business is that you have to learn things on your own,” said LaMancusa. “There is no one central place you can go to get information. I have books on running restaurants: I don’t have any books on running bookshops.”

“There are guerilla marketing tactics we use that don’t cost much,” Lindsey said. For instance, she also adds addresses from personal checks (the store accepts them, largely because it is not yet set up to take credit cards) to her mailing list.

“I attempt to remember to send them a thank-you note,” she said. “It’s the whole New Orleans thing – it’s heartfelt, but it’s also kinda milking it – thank you for supporting New Orleans, thank you for spending your time and money in our city.”

Lindsey also did a business-to-business mailing, after a fashion. “I sent out Christmas cards to a bunch of restaurants. I did not say ‘Come shop at Kitchen Witch,’ but I did put our name on them. I said, thank you so much for reopening your restaurant. Thank your staff for being part of our recovery. Little things like. And they work. People remember that. People like a personal touch.”

The personal touch comes easily to Lindsey. Nine years ago, when waitressing at The Gumbo Shop restaurant in the French Quarter, a tourist noted that at K-Paul’s restaurant, guests who cleaned their plates were rewarded with gold star stickers on their cheek. Asked what The Gumbo Shop did for similar action, Lindsey immediately fetched a roll of duct tape and plastered the tourist’s cheek with it.

Debbie Lindsey, and her endless supply of duct tape, welcome tourists to her French Quarter cookbook store.

That act branded Lindsey as a face of New Orleans, and nine years later that tourist – now a direct marketing reporter – tracked her down after the storm, and discovered she not only had survived, but had moved into retailing and marketing. Lindsey and LaMancusa may have their work cut out for them when it comes to learning about direct response, but they are naturals at relationship marketing.

This article is part of a weeklong series Direct Newsline is featuring on direct marketing and the economic recovery of New Orleans.