Loom & Lore – a turnkey, mobile bookstore experience

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

September 8, 2025

NORTHEAST WISCONSIN – Two childhood best friends have officially taken their dream from fiction to reality with last month’s grand opening of the Loom & Lore bookmobile.

Since the sixth grade, Erin Sherwood said she and her fellow co-owner, Sydney Vassell, have been virtually inseparable – attending the same middle and high school, as well as college together.

With both women wielding different, yet “complementary” skill sets, Sherwood said she and Vassell have contemplated business ownership since their college graduation.

But with Vassell living and working in North Carolina full-time, Sherwood said it had to be long-distance friendly – leading the pair to pursue opening a mobile bookstore.

“We have a long-distance business partnership going where she’s doing more behind-the-scenes stuff, and I’m [the] boots on the ground,” she said.

Both avid readers, Sherwood said they decided on a literary-focused venture after drawing inspiration from other local bookstore pop-ups “in different cities around the country.”

“Earlier this year, in about January, we started putting together a business plan and seeing what it would look like if we were to actually follow this through,” she said. “By the end of May, we were buying a bus.”

After months of renovations and retrofitting, Sherwood said their bus was revealed and introduced at Loom & Lore’s First Chapter Festival – hosted by Badger State Brewing Co.

With lots of help from friends and family, Sherwood said new shelving, floors, lighting and decorations were installed to help bring her and Vassell’s business to life.

“It was a lot of heavy lifting,” she said. “Sydney’s dad is a carpenter, and he flew in from Seattle, Washington, to help us build out the shelves and put in the subfloor and paneling on the walls. Then I have a couple of cousins, who are also carpenters/electricians, who helped us wire the bus for the lights and put the final touches on. So, it did take a village.”

However, the community’s reaction to Loom & Lore’s bookmobile, Sherwood said, made all their hard work worth it.

“I can’t even begin to describe how incredible our grand opening was,” she said. “We are so grateful.”

Now, following their First Chapter Festival, Shewood said she and Vassell are excited to help people hit the books by hitting the road – with a schedule full of pop-up events at various local businesses across the Northeast region.

“The backbone [of Loom & Lore] is partnering with local businesses and bringing books out to people where they’re at,” she said. “We think it’s very important in this day and age to promote literacy… and just pop up in places where people already are.”

Local business support

Loom & Lore’s theme, Sherwood said, “is romance only-ish” – meaning the majority of books stocked and sold in their mobile  bookstore have “romance as a theme.”

“We do have a small section of fiction and nonfiction, just because we want to have a little bit for everybody,” she said, “but that’s why we put the ‘-ish’ on the end of ‘romance only-ish.’”

When she and Vassell were contemplating potential niches for their business, Sherwood said they conducted some market research before defining what Loom & Lore would offer the area.

“We found the community of romance readers [in the region is] incredible, and they will be helping us dictate what’s on the bus as well,” she said. “We want to get the people what they’re looking for, so rotating [books], keeping a pulse on upcoming releases and doing pre-orders for popular books so we can get them in people’s hands right away.”

The literary romance community in the Greater Green Bay area and beyond, Sherwood said, flocked to Badger State Brewing last month to support Loom & Lore at its grand opening – so much so that she said “people waited in line for more than two to three hours to get on the bus.”

“We could not have imagined in our wildest dreams the turnout that was there,” she said. “The event technically ended at 9 p.m., [but] we saw people through the bus until 10 p.m. to get through the line.”

At their First Chapter Festival, Sherwood said Loom & Lore also invited “about 10 other local women-owned businesses” to pop up with them inside Badger State Brewing’s Barrel Haus.

“Most of those vendors let us know they had a great time and that it was one of the best events they [have worked] in a while, which was awesome to hear,” she said.

Badger State Brewing Company, Sherwood said, was also “blown away” by the First Chapter Festival’s turnout, and said Loom & Lore was “welcome back anytime.”

“We loved working with them,” she said. “They were a great host for our first event. We couldn’t have imagined it going any better.”

Sherwood said Wisconsin’s Northeast region has no shortage of local businesses that, so far, have welcomed the idea of hosting Loom & Lore with open arms.

“I’ve pretty much been cold-calling people or reaching out via DMs or email… and the feedback we’ve received from almost everyone we’ve reached out to is, ‘That is so cool, we would love to have you,’” she said. “We’ve been welcomed into a lot of spaces, which we’re going to be heading out to here over the next weeks and months.”

Loom & Lore’s weekly schedule of pop-up events and locations is available on its website (loomlore.square.site) or its Facebook page.

Future chapters

Sherwood said so far, she and Vassell are happy to fill “a gap in the [literary] market” across the region with their mobile book shop.

However, when the two were establishing Loom & Lore, Sherwood said the eventual goal of opening a brick-and-mortar bookstore was considered and included in their business plan.

“We had seen some romance-only bookstores pop up down in Milwaukee, [but] I don’t think we have a specific, romance-only bookstore here in Green Bay,” she said.

However, because operating a mobile bookshop involves significantly less overhead cost, Sherwood said she and Vassell chose to pursue their mobile bookstore first.

“We thought this would be a great opportunity to get out there, get the business going and grow from there, if the demand was there,” she said. “So, we’re really excited to continue growing someday.”

For now, Sherwood said she and Vassell are working to fill Loom & Lore’s schedule with pop-up events across Northeast Wisconsin.

“If there are any businesses in the Northeast Wisconsin/Fox Valley/Green Bay area who are interested in having us come to their business and do a pop-up or private event…, we’re pretty open and I’d love to hear from them,” she said.