When the Koch sisters opened the Brooklyn outpost of their romance bookstore, they inherited a small, ongoing comedy: the space used to be a pet store. The dogs of Park Slope have not adjusted. Conditioned by years of walking in and walking out with a treat, they still tow their owners straight toward the door, baffled to find shelves of paperbacks where the biscuits used to be. One dog is so insistent his owner has to lift him by his harness to get past. The sisters’ solution was immediate and on brand for them: they stocked treats so they could keep every single confused pup happy. It is a fitting origin detail for two women whose entire business runs on love, of the genre, of each other, and very much of their animals.
Two sisters, one perfect split
Bea Koch, the elder, is a devoted dog person. Leah Koch, the younger, is just as devoted to cats. It is not a small preference; by their own account it maps neatly onto their whole personalities. Bea keeps a rotating cast of beloved dogs, currently including Fiona Hodges Koch and Hamilton Hoyt Hodges Koch, the latter named for the conservationist Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, who helped get Joshua Tree protected, where Bea lives. She speaks of a first store dog, Fitz William Waffles D.D.S., Esq., who has passed but who she credits with sending the others her way. Leah, for her part, has three cats named Clementine, Antoinette, and Kevin.
The two of them turn the cat-versus-dog divide into an affectionate running argument. Leah, in true cat-person fashion, appreciates that cats take care of themselves and present themselves for affection on their own schedule, then leave you alone, a lot like, she notes, herself. Bea says she loves Leah’s cats but cannot quite grasp the point of them, and equally cannot grasp how life is worth living without a dog. For Bea, being a dog parent turned out to be something close to essential self-maintenance. She talks in therapy about how caring for her dogs, when they eat, she eats; when they walk, she walks; when they are overstimulated, she checks whether she is too, has taught her to notice her own needs as an adult. Leah gets why it fulfills people. She just does not want to go on the walks.
A bookstore built on the confidence of not knowing better
The Ripped Bodice began as a daydream between sisters nearly a decade ago. Bea was visiting Leah in Los Angeles, both finishing degrees, both sad about living apart, and they hit on the idea of going into business together, imagining a shopkeeper’s life straight out of Gilmore Girls. (It has, they will tell you, turned out to be nothing like Gilmore Girls.) Their parents had raised them to love bookstores as community spaces, and they landed on a simple, slightly reckless question: what if a store sold only the genre they loved? Amazed that no one else in the country was doing it, they moved ahead with what Leah calls the naïve confidence of people too young to know better, opening the first romance-only bookstore in the United States in Culver City in 2016.
It worked. Los Angeles readers found them, the store took off, and the sisters started stacking up ventures that cemented their main-character status: a 2018 deal with Sony Pictures TV to develop romance projects, Bea’s 2020 book Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, and eventually a second location in Park Slope, Brooklyn, their answer to the Nora Ephron corner of New York.
Why inclusion is good business, not just good manners
The Ripped Bodice is known for spotlighting authors the mainstream romance world often sidelines, especially queer writers, and Leah is refreshingly unsentimental about why. Part of it is personal, she is gay, and part is how she and Bea were raised, wanting everyone to feel there is a romance novel out there for them. But she is adamant that it is not charity. It is a for-profit business, and stocking books that are not exclusively straight, white, and Christian simply means more customers and more sales. She points out that the queer community has real buying power, and that the store’s single best-selling title one recent year was an F/F romance, Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake, not the top seller in some niche section, the top seller, period. Bea adds that queer titles have sold well from the very beginning and that the section has only ever grown. The sisters land in a characteristically honest place: they would like to be good people, and it also happens to be a smart way to run a store.
Pets, romance, and what comes next
For readers who want their love stories to come with a dog or cat attached, the sisters have recommendations at the ready, because there is enormous overlap between people obsessed with pets and people who write romance. Leah rattles off favorites like Pride and Puppies by Lizzie Shane and Puppy Love by Lucy Gilmore, the latter about a big, beefy guy paired, to his dismay, with a tiny Pomeranian as his diabetic alert dog. As Bea notes, so many romance novelists adore their own pets that animals have become a beloved fixture of the genre itself.
The bi-coastal life the store demands has its costs, mostly measured in missed pets. Leah’s cats are in LA while she is in Brooklyn living with her cat-allergic father, and the one real downside of an otherwise great stretch, she says, is how much she misses them. Bea, meanwhile, relies on a dog sitter she trusts completely and who sends her a near-constant stream of roughly a hundred photos a day, without which she says she could not travel at all. As for what is next for the Ripped Bodice, the sisters are, for once, not overextending. They are finding their footing in Brooklyn, with fun things brewing back in LA, and no giant project on the horizon. Ask again, Leah says, in a year or two.
