Friends, Meet Indie
Today I’m announcing a new venture called Indie, an ops and tech platform for modernizing Main Street. Indie emerges from an intense conviction that the next wave of commerce will be a return to local with modern conveniences attached. This approach has taken shape in operating a local business for three years and being asked countless times along the way: “How do I bring this to my community?”
In 2020, Meredith and I purchased Little Professor Bookshop, a 50-year-old local anchor in our community of Homewood, Alabama. I spent 10 years growing a campus commerce startup (which crashed in 2019), so while “books” made sense, many were surprised that operating a small, local business would capture and hold our interest.
The spark of curiosity was really simple: as avid readers and enthusiastic visitors to bookstores when traveling (albeit not-so-much the former Little Professor), it would be a fun experiment to attempt a turnaround. We believed the shop could meaningfully contribute to our community, and we simply tried to create a space that our family would enjoy visiting.
Fast-forward to 2023 and wow, it worked. We’ve grown sales 4x over the last three years, introduced a Prime-like membership model with nearly 2,000 locals who call Little Professor “my shop”, hosted more than 200 community events, and opened a second location near downtown Birmingham last November.
As I consider why and how, it’s come from many places — surprising market tailwinds, friends as enthusiastic supporters, operational improvements, building our own tech stack, finding passionate staff, memberships, captivating events, and more.
In terms of tailwinds, the pandemic actually accelerated a ‘return to local’, renewed our sense of place and created neighborly bonds of solidarity. We couldn’t foresee that print sales are now reaching 20-year highs, and that lockdown, loneliness, and digital fatigue has encouraged today’s consumer to read more. One of the more contrarian truths is that young people are flocking to books and are committed to local as much as, if not more than, older consumers. Nearly half of millennials and GenZ actually feel ‘guilty’ nowadays after using Amazon.
Yet throughout Little Professor’s turnaround, I clung to the belief that we were prototyping a broader thesis — if any local business is attractive, vibrant, and communal as well as provides modern conveniences to the customer experience (things like omnichannel options, accurate inventory, home delivery, membership perks), entire communities would enthusiastically choose to shop there over private equity-owned chains (cough) and Amazon.
That brings us to the launch of Indie, a spin-out of the “why” and “how” from Little Professor into a new venture.
Indie will partner with Main Street owner/operators to modernize local commerce around the country by offering our point-of-sale and e-commerce enablement suite, as well as a host of other B2B services around fulfillment, inventory, and access to capital. Think “Toast for retail” meets “Fulfilled-by-Amazon for local”. Any shop using our software will gain participation in the broader Indie collective — a network of independent brands in dozens of markets, retaining local ownership, but accessing our operating playbook, custom tech, consolidated purchasing power, fulfillment/delivery, financing options, and other back-office benefits. This model fits not only bookstores, but the thousands of aging small businesses across bedrock local retail categories like toy, grocery, baby, home/garden, hardware, sporting goods, and more.
Why are we so compelled by this? The world needs more anchors of authenticity in direct opposition to Amazon, big-box, or private equity-backed retail. We need small businesses to thrive, to unite communities, to help us remember our human-ness, and to be pillars of trust in our towns. Many SMBs simply haven’t, due to lagging tech adoption, declining sales, commitments to “how I’ve done it”, or rude customer service. Consumers lost interest and said yes to easy.
We’re waking up to what sheer convenience took from civic life, and more of us are turning back to Main Street. We understand that having more viable ‘third places’ bring us out of our homes and make us active participants in building social trust. A town’s social infrastructure actually facilitates stronger relationships, and each of us can help grow it through presence and participation (read Palaces for the People if you’re interested in this). Social infrastructure certainly isn’t limited to bookstores or Main Street retail — restaurants, coffee shops, libraries, parks, churches, etc. all contribute positively to the same outcome.
A collective of thriving, local, tech-enabled small businesses is what Indie hopes to build at scale, a ‘rising tide’ approach to bundling up more than 15-years’ experience in consumer commerce and product development. We will continue to focus on developing neighborhood anchors and small business services here in Birmingham, but begin to establish our model of community anchors in 4–6 new cities by year-end. Thank you to our small team, advisors, and early investors, who continue to support and believe in a local-first future of commerce.
Here’s to that future, built in community for the sake of community. Please follow along with Indie on Twitter as we prepare to announce upcoming locations, or if you’re interested in launching a ‘community hub’ in your city, please fill out this survey. Long live local.
