Tech Entrepreneurs Buy Vancouver's Kidsbooks After 43 Years

After 43 years, Vancouver's Kidsbooks has new owners — and they spent seven years nudging for the job. Avni Patel Thompson, a startup founder behind Poppy and Milo, and her husband Joseph Thompson took over the beloved Kitsilano children's bookstore in October. On Tuesday, they will make the official announcement at an event with Dav Pilkey, the author of Captain Underpants and Dog Man.

For four decades, co-owners Phyllis Simon and Kelly McKinnon ran the shop that Canadian bookselling treats as legend. Kidsbooks built elaborate front-window displays, tracked kids' ever-evolving reading habits, and was the first shop in Canada to bring in Harry Potter. Simon and McKinnon also convinced B.C.'s Raincoast Books to secure the Canadian rights to the Harry Potter franchise in the nineties — a deal that significantly boosted the distributor's fortunes.

What changes under the new owners?

Patel Thompson had been nudging the founders about succession plans for seven years before it worked. The couple aren't rushing, but they want to simplify back-office processes and become what Patel Thompson calls a humanistic counterpoint to Amazon — while keeping Amazon-level convenience.

Her track record is text-first. Poppy helped parents book caregivers over text; Milo offered an AI agent to organize family life. Now she sees a chance to combine texting with the judgment of a good bookseller for readers across B.C.'s Lower Mainland. Her example: a child comes home from school needing a book on two days' notice. The parent texts Kidsbooks, and the shop has it ready for pickup the next morning.

"The what doesn't change," Patel Thompson said. "It's the how."

The pair want to grow the business but won't franchise it — they want to keep control. Kidsbooks already has a second retail location in North Vancouver, which they're also taking over. They plan to keep building lifetime customers the way Simon and McKinnon did: following board-book readers through young-adult phases and onto new generations.

Who are the buyers?

Patel Thompson moved to Vancouver from Saskatchewan at 14 and calls herself a "hometown kid" in the city; Thompson is from Ontario. Both spent years at Procter & Gamble, and Patel Thompson worked for other consumer brands. The couple lived in Boston, Cincinnati, Shanghai and Seattle before settling in Vancouver last decade. Thompson even worked at Amazon in Seattle for a while, and he co-founded the TSX-listed eye-care company Kits.com Technologies.

Patel Thompson also spent time at Y Combinator, the acclaimed Silicon Valley startup accelerator. She frames her career as a hunt for friction.

"The message from my career has been to find the gnarliest, most interesting kind of consumer frictions and problems that people are facing," she said. "How do you build delightful products that solve them through the lens of commerce?"

What do the sellers and the industry say?

Simon and McKinnon, who couldn't run the shop forever, endorsed the handover in a joint e-mail.

"They see the value in the business, community, and team we have created over these many years," they wrote. "Not only do they want to continue our quest, but they also have plans to expand it. Kidsbooks is very dear to us and to many people in our community. We will always celebrate together as we watch children of all ages grow into confident and enthusiastic readers."

Jamie Broadhurst, vice-president of marketing at Raincoast, said the founders' impact runs wider than one franchise deal. "They helped us think how we can better serve the independent market," he said.

Broadhurst sees the same trajectory in the buyer. Patel Thompson is "deeply interested in what will a bookstore look like in the mid-21st century," he said, adding: "There's a place for the serendipity of discovery in physical retail and online, and I think that we're going to see Avni and Kidsbooks be central to those conversations going forward."

The couple and their two daughters have been regulars at the shop for a decade. "We've travelled all over the world, and we know special when we see it," Patel Thompson said. Thompson put it more simply: "Every family should have access to a fabulous neighbourhood bookstore."

The bet, in her words: "We're not just selling books. We're selling a perspective on how books are centred on all of these different learning experiences, and it's a perspective that is needed now more than ever."