When Marissa Coughlin left her latest tech job to open a romance bookstore and crafting hub in Seattle, she didn’t leave technology behind completely.
In fact, alongside her partner, Constantine Vetoshev, who still works in tech, artificial intelligence has become a major player in this next chapter of their lives.
Coughlin 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 AI to help clinical teams deliver remote care.
Both big readers, the pair first started looking at spaces and developing a bookstore business plan in 2023. But with two small children, they were waiting for better timing. When a space became available on Market Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood they finally made the leap, and opened Swoon City last month.
While Coughlin has no interest in seeing AI used to write the books or illustrate the covers that line her shelves, she’s a big believer in how the technology can help the back end of the business.
“I think more businesses should be using this stuff, especially small businesses, if they can figure out how to tap into it,” Coughlin said. “It’s super useful, but you have to know that it’s there and what it can do, and be a little bit creative and figure out the solutions.”
Here are some of the ways Swoon City is tapping into AI, leveraging Coughlin and Vetoshev’s know-how:
- To help pick the store’s inventory of 3,000 books, they used analysis based on Seattle Public Library data of the most-borrowed romance novels over the past 18 months.
- They built a custom generative AI tool to categorize all the romance novels they bought into sub-genres so people can quickly find their favorites. For example, the book “Thirsty” would typically just be categorized under romance or maybe paranormal 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. Vetoshev, who said he is “all in” on Anthropic, asked the AI assistant Claude to analyze some requirements they had for different programs. Claude wrote back and said, “You could go with this one, or you could just 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 could tap into and be able to leverage for their own stuff,” Coughlin said.
Vetoshev said he can come home from his day job, put the kids to bed and then focus on something that needs to be built for the store.
“A couple of hours of work with a [large language] model, and we’re off to the races,” he said.
The technology is all in service of a genre that is exploding, especially among young readers.
Romance is the leading growth category for the total print book market thus far in 2025, and the volume for the category has more than doubled compared to four years ago, with 51 million units sold in the past 12 months, according to industry analysis.
NPR credited romance interest driven by Gen Z readers, especially on BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books.
Swoon City is hoping to follow in the successful footsteps of The Ripped Bodice, an independent brick-and-mortar romance bookstore with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, N.Y.
Coughlin looks forward to bringing people together not just around books, but by hosting various events and building out crafting classes for embroidery, stained glass, jewelry making and more.
“I feel like part of what was exciting for a romance bookstore is the community, because it is often not a genre that’s as well respected in the book community, even though it’s huge,” she said.
