Cozy & Content didn’t begin with a five-year plan or a dream of entrepreneurship. It started with burnout, friendship, and a wild idea that shouldn’t have worked on paper — but did. And like most chaotic success stories, it didn’t begin with confidence. It began with two exhausted people trying to escape a life that wasn’t working anymore.
If you’re reading this right now, you must be at least mildly curious as to how Cozy and Content got its start. How do two people no one really knows open up a bookstore off the beaten path and manage to turn it into a local favorite? Well, get comfy and I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version of how Samantha and I took a random idea fueled by ADHD and stress, and turned it into a successful small-town bookstore.
What This Post Covers
- How it started
- How we kept it going
- How we’re doing now
How it started
Long ago (4 years ago) in a land far away (about 3 miles down the road), Samantha and I were just coworkers at another local small business. The year was 2021. I was the store manager, she was a sales associate, and despite a 15-year age difference, we became friends. Was it smooth sailing the whole time? No.
She’d never watched Lord of the Rings and didn’t know the lyrics to a single Celine Dion song; I had no idea what Salad Fingers was and didn’t consider "Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')" by T-Pain to be a defining song of my teen years. I was married with a teen son; she was in a relationship and had no kids. We had nothing in common but a love of yapping, and a true fondness for ghost hunting.
Time passed. We grew closer. Life and work became stressful. But we enjoyed being together. We worked well together. I was the idea person, she reined in the multitude of completely undoable ideas (bookstore + alpaca farm + grist mill = bankruptcy). But Samantha was ready to move on from where we were, and I believed that together we could do something amazing…but limited to an existing skill set. Whatever we did needed to be smartly done and successful because neither of us are independently wealthy to offset a lot of failures.
And then one day in November, it hit me.
It was late one evening, and I was drained from work — mentally and emotionally. I’d been ranting in a text to Samantha when I looked at the stack of books on my nightstand — the ones I kept telling myself I’d get to “someday” — and thought: why am I not doing something with this instead?
I loved to read. Always had. So did Samantha. Okay…a bookstore. But that’s been done, so how do we make something different? Especially in a small town with a customer base that skews 60+, doesn’t offer much in the way of higher education or professional opportunities, and gives the impression of being stuck in an antiquarian, closed mindset?
So we decided to take the leap and go all in on a business that appeals to the opposite of that. Banned books, inappropriate stickers, fairy smut, weird gifts, vinyl records — whatever this small town didn’t have, that’s what we tried to offer. We wanted a place people could hang out. A space that felt younger, funnier, more alive than the traditional small-town shops. We wanted books that weren’t represented in Franklin.
How we kept it going
We received a lot of advice in the beginning. Mostly unsolicited, which is what seems to happen with every new business. And what we learned (which I’ll go over in more depth in another post, another time) that helped us more than anything is this: Franklin isn’t like any other town.
What works in Omaha, Houston, Boston, and most other cities in this country, won’t work here. You have to be downtown to survive? I’m sure it helps, but not necessarily, and our downtown doesn’t have the space available that most towns have. We should advertise more? Oh really? Where? We already do in the local papers, the high school, social media. We’ve had people hide books they found offensive, leave religious information for us. It went on and on.
Turns out, we had to find our own way. We had to learn what sold and what didn’t, good price points and bad, when to open and close. We built this store around our customers — what they wanted, what they needed, what made them happy.
We purchased books we loved, or that we thought customers would love, and it turns out people want romance and fantasy more than anything else. Speaks to the state of the world, doesn’t it?
We worked non-stop for 7 months to get the store ready for opening. All while working our regular day jobs because, you know, bills. It was all dreams and ideas and hypotheticals, until August 1, 2022 — opening day.
All the fears, the worries that no one would stop by, disappeared and we were SLAMMED. We looked at each other across the counter — exhausted, stunned, thrilled — and realized: we actually did it.
People loved it. And they kept loving it, and that’s what’s made it all so worthwhile. Every single time someone says, “This is my favorite store,” that’s why we’re here. Happiness.
How we’re doing now
So where has that left us now, three years in? Going harder, thinking outside the box. I took out a second mortgage on our house to open the store, spent a tremendous amount more than that, and am now working to pay things off. I earn no money from the store — not uncommon for young small businesses — and I still work at my old job remotely to make ends meet. The third year is the hardest, so we’re told. But we’re still here.
And how does this translate to me on a personal level? On a daily basis, I’m in awe. Every single time someone says how much they love this store, how they haven’t seen anywhere else quite like it — those things make all the effort worth it. It makes budgeting, and sacrificing time and money and energy, worth it.
I’m proud of what Samantha and I built — and what we’re still building. This little community of happiness.
We’re finally showing profits, but profit doesn’t mean ease — it means progress, momentum, and proof that the work is paying off. Each year is better than the last, although we’ve had a few hiccups this year for various reasons.
We have a clear plan for 2026, and we hope to continue growing and expanding in the future. We’ve reduced our vinyl selection due to slow sales and razor-thin margins, but we’re planning to replace it with something cool soon.
To me, you can’t ask for a better third year. Making plans, surviving, and hoping to thrive in the future.
Cozy & Content wasn’t supposed to work — not on paper, not in this location, not with two people learning everything from scratch. But it did. And this blog is where I finally tell the whole story. And honestly? For two people who never planned to do this, I think we’re doing pretty damn well.
Next up: What People Don’t Tell You About Opening a Bookstore (coming soon)