Michelle Pierce opened Malibu Village Books in 2023 and the store gained momentum through community events, a school book fair, and rising sales despite high local overhead. The Franklin Fire forced a shutdown during the crucial holiday season, erasing the store's entire holiday sales and interrupting operations for several weeks. The Palisades Fire killed a dozen people, destroyed homes and displaced many community members. A four-month closure of the Pacific Coast Highway during cleanup created a false perception that Malibu was closed, further suppressing customer traffic. Surviving small businesses faced lost revenue and a slow, uneven recovery.
In the early days of December 2024, Michelle Pierce, the owner of the recently opened indie bookstore Malibu Village Books, was finally starting to feel like her little shop was finding its footing. Opened the year before, the store had just launched a big book fair at a Malibu school, and was well into making inroads with other local institutions to collaborate on events.
Along with a slew of other small businesses in the area, Malibu Village Books shut its doors as crews worked to contain the flames - during the busiest month of the year, when a surge of holiday sales, events and pop-ups can make or break solvency. After closing for several weeks, "we lost our entire holiday sales," Pierce says. Mercifully, things started to pick up again after the store reopened late in December 2024: "I was like, 'This is going to be OK.'"
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