You left technology to open a romantic bookstore, and AI helps small businesses thrive

You left technology to open a romantic bookstore, and AI helps small businesses thrive

By Kurt Schlosser | Published: 2025-11-04 16:23:00 | Source: GeekWire

when Marissa Coughlin She left her most recent tech job to open a romantic bookstore and craft center in Seattle, and she’s not leaving technology completely behind.

In fact, along with her partner, Konstantin Vitoshevwho are still working in technology, AI is becoming a major player in this next chapter of their lives.

Coughlin has worked in a variety of communications and content roles for companies including Airbnb, Textio, Highspot, and most recently T-Mobile. Vetoshev is a software developer at Brook.ai, a Seattle-area health technology startup that uses artificial intelligence to help clinical teams deliver care remotely.

Both big readers, the couple first began researching space and developing a business plan for a bookstore in 2023. But with two young children, they were waiting for better timing. When space became available on Market Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, they finally took the leap and opened it Scone city last month.

While Coughlin isn’t interested in seeing AI used to write books or illustrate the covers that line her shelves, she is a strong believer in how technology can help the back end of a business.

“I think more businesses should be using these things, especially small businesses, if they can figure out how to take advantage of them,” Coughlin said. “It’s very useful, but you have to know it’s there and what it can do, and be a little creative and figure out solutions.”

Here are some of the ways Swoon City is leveraging AI, drawing on the expertise of Coughlin and Vetoshev:

• To help select the store’s 3,000-book inventorythey used analysis based on Seattle Public Library data of the most borrowed romance novels over the past 18 months.
• They have built a generative AI tool specifically for classification All the romance novels they purchased are divided into subgenres so people can quickly find their favorites. For example the book “thirsty” It’s usually categorized under romance or perhaps supernatural romance, but Swoon’s system categorizes it as paranormal romance, LGBTQ, enemies-to-lovers, vampire romance, romantic comedy, and urban fantasy.
• GenAI was used to build a customer loyalty program. Vitoshev, who said he was fully involved in Anthropic, asked AI assistant Claude to analyze some requirements they had for different programs. “You can use this product,” Claude replied, “or you can build it yourself. Here’s how.”

“I feel like there’s a lot of things that we’ve created for this store that other people who might be curious about doing something like this can take advantage of and be able to leverage into their own things,” Coughlin said.

Vitoshev said he could come home from his day job, put the kids to bed and then focus on something that needed to be built for the shop.

“Two hours of working with a model (in big language), and we’re off to the races,” he said.

Technology is all in the service of a genre that is exploding, especially among young readers.

Romance is the leading growth category in the total print book market so far in 2025, and the category has doubled in size from four years ago, with 51 million units sold in the past 12 months, according to Industry analysis.

NPR Ascribed romantic interest driven by Gen Z readers, especially on BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books.

Swoon City hopes to follow in successful footsteps Ripped bodicean independent romance bookstore with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, New York

Coughlin looks forward to bringing people together not only over books, but by hosting various events and creating craft classes for embroidery, stained glass, jewelry making and more.

“I feel like the community is part of what’s been exciting about the romance bookstore, because a lot of times the genre doesn’t get a lot of respect in the book community, as big as it is,” she said.

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