It comes up again and again when talking about Godmothers, the seven-month-old bookstore in Summerland, California that has already become one of the most well-known and talked about bookstores in the country. There’s a feeling when entering the space—an energy that’s difficult to describe but impossible to ignore.

“To the energy thing,” co-founder Jennifer Rudolph Walsh tells me on Zoom, “I just want to say the thing we hear most often, just in the aisles and everything, is people walk in and they say, ‘I don’t know why this place makes me feel like crying.’”

Not crying as in sad—crying as in overcome with the sheer emotion of the place, “the love and intention that we poured into every book, every shelf, every rug, every lamp, every placement,” Rudolph Walsh continues. “So it’s that love and intention.”

“We hear that all day,” she adds.

Her co-founder Victoria Jackson chimes in that Godmothers, which opened its doors just last September 8, has helped put Summerland—the neighbor of the more famous Montecito in Santa Barbara County—on the map.

“Summerland—it’s just a happy place,” Jackson says. “And then you come to a beautiful bookstore, and it’s really become this destination and must-see, and people hanging out—and it’s very comfortable.”

You can’t force the emotional feeling that visitors to Godmothers get when walking in the space, but the space itself is “all really well thought out,” Jackson says. “We wanted to create a beautiful space, a space that felt really welcoming.”

After all, this is neither Rudolph Walsh nor Jackson’s first foray into entrepreneurship. When asked what reading has meant to her, celebrated literary agent Rudolph Walsh says, “I mean, for me, that’s like saying ‘What has breathing meant?’” She is arguably more familiar with The New York Times bestseller list than almost every author whose book is on the shelves at Godmothers. For her, reading “is just a way of being in the world,” she tells me. “It’s how I process, how I learn, how I stretch and grow. So I can’t separate reading from talking, breathing, eating. It’s—it’s a mode of being for me.”

Jackson is the entrepreneur behind the cosmetics empire Victoria Jackson Cosmetics and No Makeup Makeup, the first person to market a cosmetics line on television who spent 10 years on QVC, developing over 600 products and generating $1 billion in sales. In more recent years, she’s become a medical trailblazer and an author herself. Jackson’s latest book, We All Worry, Now What?, came out just five days before Godmothers opened its doors last September; Gloria Steinem inducted Jackson into the National Women’s Hall of Fame nine years ago.

So yeah, these are two women that have already made their mark—so why start a bookstore now?

“We’re just both at these interesting times in our lives,” Jackson says. “I think so much of it is where we are in life, and what we thought would be great to do to add into the wonderful life that we’re both living at this point.”

So, enter Godmothers.

Rudolph Walsh and Jackson met at a dinner party three-and-a-half years ago, “and it was just love at first sight,” Rudolph Walsh says.

The two found out so many coincidences and connections, so many “crazy things” they have in common, as Rudolph Walsh puts it, right down to being born in the same hospital—Long Island Jewish—and having three kids apiece, two boys and a girl. One of Rudolph Walsh’s sons and one of Jackson’s sons were even born on the same date. They’re both grandmothers, and they both enjoy playing mahjong, which the world got a glimpse of as both women played the game alongside friends Tracy Robbins and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex in the latter’s Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, which dropped on the streaming service last month.

“We’ve just been the best of friends ever since, really, from that one day on,” Rudolph Walsh says.

Rudolph Walsh had finished her life in New York City five years prior, she tells me, and was unsure if she'd ever work again. Those years in between New York City and now, she says, were her “sacred pause,” and she “had no idea how long it was going to last, or if it would ever end.”

“I would ask myself every day, ‘What do I need to do to keep the peace?’” she says. Most days, she adds, it was to continue on the path of “nature and joy” that she was on.

“But towards the end of it, I started to feel like I did miss something,” Rudolph Walsh continues. “And it wasn’t the business. It wasn’t managing people. It was gathering together around books and ideas, jumping into the deep end of conversations.”

Of Santa Barbara, she adds, it is “physically magnificent” and “there’s delicious food and incredible activities and hikes, but there wasn’t really that gathering space where you could kind of get together and jump into the deep end and just get really real. So that’s what I missed. I missed the book tribe.”

One day in 2023, she and Jackson grabbed lunch. The subject of opening a bookstore came up very organically, Rudolph Walsh says, and by the end of the meal, “I like to say it was sealed with a hug, not sealed with a handshake. And that was it. There was no turning back.”

Fifteen months after that lunch, Godmothers opened its doors.

“It was organic, it was alchemy,” Rudolph Walsh says. “It wasn’t one person’s idea over the other. It was the nature of our relationship, which had been up until that point very much about transformation and transition and living a full life that’s really driven by joy. And so it just kind of emerged, very naturally.”

The two women both knew the building they wanted Godmothers to be in, which Jackson ended up buying. (“I do have kind of a nice landlord,” Rudolph Walsh tells me cheekily.) The 1920s white barn is over 100 years old and has been through many iterations in its lifetime: a hardware store, an antique store and, right before Jackson bought the building, a home furnishings store. Admittedly, Jackson says, the building “definitely needed some love,” and “was a complete do-over.” Calling decorating a passion of hers—even kind of a therapy—Jackson got to work transforming the space into a place that people would want to come and sit and just stay for a while.

“When you come in, I love when I go there and I always hear people going, ‘Oh my God, this store’s so beautiful,’” Jackson tells me. “Or they want to sit in all the chairs or [say] ‘Wow, where’d they get that couch?’ or whatever it is. So I love that every angle of the store, every piece was really thought through.”

There was one not-so-minor detail, though—what to call this beautiful space? Insert none other than Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey. (Sure, this is a neighborhood bookstore—but here, the Duke of Sussex and the legend that is Winfrey are your neighbors.)

“We had done a book party—Victoria, myself, and Oprah—for our friend Prince Harry,” Rudolph Walsh tells me, referring to Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare. “And Harry had been calling us ‘fairy godmothers,’ and we were really enjoying that name. And Victoria and I are both godmothers to many people in many different aspects of our lives. We are two women that have been holding the door open for other women for 30-plus years in our respective lives. It’s something that we instantly bonded over. And so, when the time came for us to name the store, Oprah said, ‘Well, it has to be named Godmothers.’”

“And so it is,” Rudolph Walsh says. “And so it shall be.”

Jackson calls Godmothers a passion project—a manifestation of a place that both she and Rudolph Walsh were looking for and, when they couldn’t find it, they created it. (Don’t the best businesses come from just exactly that?)

“Believe it or not, you can still enjoy your grandkids and enjoy your time and still start a business,” Jackson says. “I have a lot of businesses going at the same time right now—whether it’s Godmothers or I’m working still in the field of autoimmune disease and working to find a cure. And I also have a makeup business I just started, No Makeup Makeup. So there’s a lot of things going on. But this, to me, fell into the category of just pure joy of this part of my life. I thought it would be a really nice addition to all the other wonderful things that I have going on, and I think the sense of community and always learning new things and trying something different—I never looked at it as it was going to be a stressor.”

Rudolph Walsh and Jackson look at Godmothers’ bottom line a bit differently than most business owners likely do—it’s less about profit and loss and more about “service through joy,” as Rudolph Walsh puts it.

“It wasn’t about, ‘Oh, we’ve got to build this multi-billion dollar [business],’” Jackson says. “It’s doing it for the love of it, and seeing what comes.”

As bookstores grapple with an ample amount of book buying being done online these days, Godmothers has become “the beating heart of our community,” Rudolph Walsh says. In addition to being able to buy books, Godmothers’ events rival your average bookstore: for starters, Winfrey, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Ellen DeGeneres, and Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd were at Godmothers’ opening weekend back in September; next month, for example, Winfrey will interview friend Maria Shriver about her new book of poems, I Am Maria, on Godmothers’ stage.

That stage has also seen Gwyneth Paltrow interview friend Amy Griffin about her book The Tell in March, and Lauren Sánchez and Nicole Avant have also spoken about their respective books; Rob Lowe interviewed fellow actor Josh Brolin about his memoir, From Under the Truck, in November, and actress Jordana Brewster interviewed Sarah Hoover about her deeply personal memoir, The Motherload, earlier this year, after the two connected around shared experiences of motherhood. It was a packed house for Hoover’s talk, and walking into Godmothers was like walking “on the set of a Nancy Meyers movie,” Hoover tells me on Zoom.

“That part of California is also very magically beautiful and kind of feels like you’re on mushrooms the whole time you’re there anyway,” she says. “That Montecito stretch is so beautiful that every business needs to be beautiful to match it. And this one certainly is. I mean, it feels like a space that’s made for women for sure. It’s very nurturing.”

“I think everyone on the team there is really rad, which makes it an even better place,” Hoover continues of Godmothers’ staff of roughly 22. “I love when you go to a bookstore and everyone who works in the store has read the books and can give you good recommendations and stuff, and it’s a place like that.”

While Hoover acknowledged that Godmothers’ has “a powerhouse list of people” who call it their local bookstore—a stark difference from, say, where she grew up in “the middle of nowhere in Indiana”—Hoover called a trip to her local bookstore in days of yesteryear “such a respite and so important to me, and reading was one of the few ways I had to imagine life in other places.” She adds, “I don’t think I’d be where I am today without a bookstore, and a bookstore like Godmothers does such a good job of providing programming for the community and makes it a real intellectual hotbed, which is very cool.”

I find fellow author Dani Shapiro out of the country, so we email about her event at Godmothers back in early October—one of the first the bookstore offered—where she spoke to her literary agent for over 20 years, Rudolph Walsh, last fall. “We talked about many of my books, but mostly we did a deep dive into process,” Shapiro tells me. “I offered writing prompts to the crowd—believe me, something that doesn’t often happen at a bookstore event!—and it was magical.”

Walking into Godmothers “is a marvel,” Shapiro says. “It’s exquisite inside and out. You walk in and are greeted by the images of women writers who have come before—who are icons, role models, mentors, elders. Every nook and cranny is a discovery. It’s highly curated, yet wide-ranging.” It would be easy to spend the whole day at Godmothers, Shapiro says, adding she felt instantly relaxed when she walked through the doors of the space. “It made me want to move next door so I could visit every day!” she adds.

“I think in the best bookstores it becomes possible to get lost, to browse, to pick a book up off the shelf based on nothing more than instinct, to discover new voices, new writers, new ideas,” she continues. “Bookstores are radically important—perhaps now more than ever—because they expose us to different voices and world views.”

Just last Thursday, journalist Danielle Robay walked into Godmothers for the first time to interview Neha Ruch about her book The Power Pause, which Robay described to me on Zoom as a feeling “like you’re walking into somebody’s very beautiful, very warm and very curated living room—and I say curated in a really positive sense. Every nook when you walk in—there's this really beautiful wall of photos from all of these women who have impacted culture and I think have been godmothers to all of us in some ways. And it says something like ‘To the godmothers that have lit up your path,’ and it makes you want to go sit in there—you feel like you’re with all of these women, even though they’re not there with you, because we’ve read so many of their words that they’re with us in spirit. And so I think that the bookstore embodies that.”

Robay—who had a bookstore growing up in Glencoe, Illinois that she visited after school, eating brownies and reading books that “fostered my love of words and love of reading and love of authorship”—calls a local bookstore “a sanctuary for kids in particular. I know adults love them, but kids need bookstores. I think they’re a safe space. They’re a community hub.” (Godmothers, for its part, offers storytime for kids every Saturday morning, which is always packed.)

Robay says she feels indebted to the women who ran her hometown bookstore, Books on Vernon, because reading helped her become the communicator that she is today. Known in particular for her ability to ask pertinent questions, Robay tells me that “In my job, people always ask me, ‘Well, how do I learn to get better at questions or communication or conversation?’ And it’s pretty simple. The answer is to read.”

“I just think independent bookstores are foundational to a beautiful, burgeoning community, and we’re losing them, especially, sadly, in big cities,” Robay says. “It’s hard for them.” At Godmothers, she says, the magic was in the details. The tray of tea and honey and crackers and cookies. The books lining the walls, floor to ceiling. The books on tables that are coordinated, not by color, but “you can tell they’re there for a reason,” she tells me. “Everything has a very specific place, and it’s very full without being cluttered.” Onstage, there are microphones—intentional, Robay thinks, to further elevate authors’ voices.

“It feels like a sanctuary for people who love words—for thinkers, for dreamers, for storytellers,” Robay adds. “And I think what I noticed most was we live in such a busy world, and when you walk into the bookstore, you feel like it’s this sacred pause from the noise. You could just take a breath.”

I spoke to Rudolph Walsh and Robay totally independently of one another; they both used the phrase “sacred pause.” The alignment there? That’s representative of what Godmothers really seems to be all about.

Godmothers encompasses three floors; upon entering the space, visitors walk through what Rudolph Walsh and Jackson call their Godmothers Hall, a “sacred space,” according to Rudolph Walsh, of women who have lit the way—and not just authors, either. Sure, there’s Maya Angelou and Joan Didion, for example, but there’s also Harriet Tubman. Sally Ride. Frida Kahlo. Rosa Parks. Amelia Earhart. Billie Jean King. Winfrey and Steinem. It’s meant to set the tone and intention of the space from the beginning, Jackson says; it’s meant to elevate visitors immediately.

“It has kind of a holy feeling,” Rudolph Walsh says. “People walk in and they’re called to their sacred self, and it permeates the whole experience.”

Rudolph Walsh and Jackson designed Godmothers to be more than a bookstore, but a gathering space. There are the aforementioned live events and storytime for kids and even mahjong tournaments. The main stage event space seats about 100 people (in the pattern of alliteration they’ve naturally fallen into, this is called Godmothers Gather); the second floor is largely dedicated to the kids’ space. Elsewhere on the second floor are events for those in what Rudolph Walsh and Jackson call the Founders Circle, and in the Founders Lounge they host dinners and cocktail parties. On the third floor, that’s where workshops, retreats and book clubs happen (known as Godmothers Grow). Each space has its own unique feeling, Rudolph Walsh says, and each space is very intimate. There’s a food truck onsite (called Godmothers Graze), and, in the hopes you’ll sit and stay awhile, you can buy breakfast—avocado toast for $11.50, a blueberry muffin for $6, or yogurt and berries for $7, for example—or if you’re there at lunchtime, you can grab items including a ham and cheese panino for $8, a roasted pepper sandwich with mozzarella for $17, or a mixed greens salad for $15. (Keeping with the G alliteration, there’s a philanthropic arm of the business called Godmothers Give, where they currently support a book club at a local women’s prison in Santa Barbara; Godmothers Go is where the business is doing events here and there in other places, though Jackson says they’re not ready to franchise Godmothers yet.)

It helps that both Rudolph Walsh and Jackson are experienced in business. First off, as Rudolph Walsh says, “We’re not afraid to pivot if we need to.” (Wisdom it takes many entrepreneurs many decades to learn sometimes.)

“We’re very clear in what we want to do and what we don’t want to do,” Jackson tells me, adding that Godmothers is different from other businesses she’s started. “As two businesswomen that have had the careers we’ve had,” she says, they think it all through, but don’t necessarily obsess over “the bottom line, maybe to the extent that we have or that I may do in my other businesses, because this does fall more into that joy.”

For example, when I ask whether foot traffic has increased since they were both seen on With Love, Meghan, Jackson tells me “we don’t really measure that. We’re just so grateful for all the traffic that we get in the store—every single person, we’re glad about that. We’re not the ones in there checking the numbers every day and doing that. I guess maybe we’re not thinking of it in business the same way. We’re just grateful for the people that are excited about it [Godmothers], however they’ve heard about it, and coming to the store.”

The women set out to have three buckets, Rudolph Walsh tells me: their locals, their tourists and their pilgrims. “We said we know we’re going to have made it when the pilgrims come—and we define that as somebody who’s come from more than an hour away,” she says. “They have come and they have come and they have come and they have come. So people are making a pilgrimage to our store to come to our events, to just sit in our chairs.”

They want to be “a local bookstore with a global impact,” she continues. They’ll continue to look for different ways—think e-commerce, travel, the whole pivoting when they need to element—to “take the magic light of Godmothers and spread it across the world.”

But nothing quite beats being in a local bookstore, and the women are glad Godmothers has become, in Jackson’s words, a destination spot. “Anybody who’s ever been found by a book or who’s found a friend or an affinity club at a bookstore understands that there’s nothing online that could replicate the power of being there,” Rudolph Walsh says.

“We all know bookstores have been disappearing,” Jackson adds, thankful that “the store is always busy” and “that people just love being there.”

Jackson adds that it’s their goal for authors to want to make Godmothers a stop on their respective book tours, telling me she’s happy that “in a relatively short amount of time, we’ve put it on the map that people want to be there. And I think that they like that there is this very intimate setting.” Authors tell her after their events “how much they love the intimacy of the place and how comfortable it feels, so that they feel they can even express themselves more or feel at home. And that is what the store has created—it allows them to feel comfortable in telling their stories.”

Perhaps more than anything, the two women are proud of what they’ve ignited in their Santa Barbara community. Rudolph Walsh says people tell her they feel more a part of the community in the past seven months since Godmothers opened its doors “than sometimes in the 25 years that they’ve lived in this community prior to that,” she says. “So that’s incredibly gratifying, and not surprising, actually.” Creating a community that’s “inclusive, intergenerational, incredibly welcoming”—where the only criteria for joining the community is not being in a certain tax bracket or success level but having “an open heart and an open mind”—is “a blessing,” she adds. When I asked if the Summerland community needed a place like that, she quickly answers, “What community is not in need?”

“Jennifer and I—we have very high standards of ourselves and what we want to put out in the world,” Jackson says. “It’s always got to be with love and a sense of excellence.” She adds, “and I think that’s—we want to just make sure that we’re staying true to who we are and we’re having fun with it and we’re seeing how people are responding. And we’ll keep on going and we’ll keep on growing.”

Simply put, Rudolph Walsh and Jackson didn’t need to open a bookstore, but at the same time, they needed to open a bookstore. It’s not for dollars and cents. It’s for, as Jackson put it, beauty and connection. Led by the heart and not by the pocketbook, the roots of the business stemmed from that lunch conversation, where two friends found that they were both looking for the same missing piece they couldn’t yet find in their community.

“If you want something for yourself, that’s a good indication that the community needs it,” Rudolph Walsh tells me. “That we’re more alike than we are different. And the first people that are served by Godmothers is me and Victoria. We love it there. And so I would just say to a person who has an idea that maybe doesn’t seem commercial on the outside, but that fills a need for themselves—that’s a good indication of something that others are probably hungry for as well.”

“We built it for us,” Jackson echoes.

“Absolutely, for sure," Rudolph Walsh continues. “I mean, my career has been a journey from scale to intimacy, which is a very—most people go the other way.”

Godmothers, she says, is “intimate activism”: “It’s just activating people around what really matters—I mean, for me, I want it to just be a place where people feel that they saw my heart, they really just saw my heart,” Rudolph Walsh says thoughtfully.

Jackson admits that even her kids say that opening a bookstore has been “a bit of a left turn.”

“My kids are all like, ‘Wow, Mom, you opened a bookstore,’” she adds. “I think there’ll be this part of—and I really do try to say this humbly—that, ‘Wow, she also opened a bookstore.’” Surprising? Yes. But also, she says, “really in step with everything that I am doing and I’ve always done, in thinking about community and purpose. And I hope our bookstore will be remembered for that.”