How Barnes & Noble’s ‘cluster’ system balances local knowledge with corporate expertise

When Virginia Evans’s debut novel, The Correspondent, hit shelves in April 2025, it was just one new fiction title among many for the Barnes & Noble corporate team. But then individual booksellers started emailing the main office that customers were coming in and asking for the title. The bottom-up feedback led the company to approach the publisher and secure more copies of the book, which is now a bestseller.

This process may seem straightforward enough, but for the once-struggling book chain, this kind of smooth communication between corporate and store-level managers was no accident. After private equity firm Elliott Management took over in 2019 and hired James Daunt as CEO, Barnes & Noble started restructuring its business to put more power in the hands of individual stores. The success of this model is well-documented, and today the firm is even considering a return to public markets. But what is arguably less well understood is the distinctive corporate structure that helps mediate between the local, regional, and national levels of the business.

Bubbling up: Shannon DeVito, senior director of books at Barnes & Noble, described what happened with The Correspondent as an example of local managers “bubbling” up information about sales trends, and then the corporate level responding in real time.

“Having that constant flow of information and communication is critical to how we’re set up in the way we run business now,” she said, “because they can’t know everything about everything, and we can’t know what’s going on in those individual stores.”

Barnes & Noble took a more top-down approach prior to 2019, when “we would just be pushing stock and crossing our fingers and hoping that it was in the right place at the right time,” she said.

In the past, agreements with publishers established a set amount of product across stores, and local managers “had no control over what was coming in,” Janine Flanigan, VP of store design at Barnes & Noble, told Retail Brew. This created a situation where huge quantities of books would sit unsold and more inventory was ultimately wasted, compared to now where stores participate in the decision-making process and are able to “buy more intentionally,” she said.

Bubbling down: There are limits to local knowledge, however, and key to Barnes & Noble’s new model is that the “bubbling” of information goes both ways, according to DeVito. Through a process it calls the “cluster structure,” regional group leaders help booksellers at up to six stores each with different sides of the business. There are cluster leaders for inventory purchasing, merchandising and store layout, and sideline businesses such as toys and games, for example.

These leaders touch base on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, sharing information such as overall performance, which products are selling, which products are stacking up on shelves, and if a given section or category needs more space. This information is shared with corporate management, which then sends out a weekly email with a rundown of the latest sales trends across the country, so stores are prepared to capitalize on what’s hot in different markets, such as, hockey-related romances following the success of the HBO show Heated Rivalry.

“The stores themselves communicate to each other,” Flanigan said. “That’s the beauty of the cluster structure…They’re talking to each other and working through the inventory, making sure that stores are stocked.”

Undergirding this more decentralized and flexible model is a commitment to knowledge sharing and education. “The most important thing, honestly, is just bookseller education,” DeVito said. “It’s really about learning the different sections of the store, and booksellers getting more comfortable and confident in what is going to sell.”