Heather Reisman, founder and CEO of Indigo Books & Music, is one of Canada’s most successful and best-known business leaders.
But no one can say she’s had an easy ride.
Over the past six years, she’s watched Indigo’s stock plummet to a low of 90 cents a share from a high of $20. There was a boardroom shakeup that saw four members resign, and Reisman herself left the company only to rejoin it in September of last year.
A cyberattack last year brought down Indigo’s website and electronic payment system, leading to a tough financial year that saw $50 million in losses.
Then, in April of this year, Reisman took the chain private, when Trilogy Retail Holdings and Trilogy Investments — owned by her husband, Gerald Schwartz — bought up its stock at $2.50 per share.
Today, Indigo is battered, somewhat bruised, and its financials are hidden from public view.
But it is still the largest bookseller based in Canada. And Reisman, now 76, is still firmly in charge.
Walking into the massive boardroom at Indigo’s head office in Toronto, Reisman is self-assured, quiet and deliberate. She knows her company has been under intense scrutiny, even written off by some.
But she’s calm, optimistic.
“This is a hard business,” she admits, describing why she took her company private.
“You think you can fix it. And I knew that I would have to invest in the business. So there’s a risk. But the entrepreneur in me felt this was a risk I would take.”
A ‘feeling of comfort’
Reisman’s belief in the business is as sure as her unwavering belief in herself.
Her parents taught her she could do anything she set her mind to. Not through their words, but their actions.
Reisman and her three siblings were always included in her parents’ dining-table discussions about world affairs. There was no distinction between “grown-up talk and kid talk,” she says. “Whatever the topic was — it could have been a war, any critical issue that was going on — they explained it,” Reisman says. “We were in it.”
In the Reisman household, there was no such thing as men’s work, or women’s work.
Her mother worked at a high-end retail boutique her father purchased from the proceeds of his real estate business. This was 1950s and ‘60s Montreal, when women were not expected to work, she says.
Her father celebrated and championed her mother’s desire to “work for the interest in working,” Reisman says.
When she entered the workforce, Reisman rarely felt limited by her age or gender. “I’ve lived my life with a fully resolved and integrated feeling of comfort in any role,” she says. “If there was something that I wanted to be or do, that it was not proscribed by what sex I was. And I think that was a pretty enlightened view.”
Reisman didn’t try to plan out her career. Instead, she pursued roles that fed her curiosity.
At 20, she became a volunteer caseworker for unwed mothers and children in foster care. At the time, the government stopped financially supporting foster children when they turned 16, so Reisman set up a program to help them find employment. The experience sparked a lifelong entrepreneurial streak.
Reisman joined her brother’s computer company, and learned all about “what computers could do,” she says. She was recruited to a consulting firm, then left that firm to co-found her own, Paradigm Consulting, which she owned for more than a decade before leaving in 1992 to become the president of Cott Corporation, a soft-drink bottler. She helped grow the company into the world’s largest retail-branded beverage supplier.
She founded Indigo in 1996, and for 20 years, it was a success.
But the rise of Amazon, e-readers and other online booksellers began to eat away at the company’s valuation starting in 2018, and its stock saw a long decline that took it briefly into penny-stock territory in June 2020.
Then the pandemic lockdowns hit — hard.
“A lot of things happened to the business over (the past) four-year period,” Reisman says. “It did put pressure on its financials.”
Reisman, approaching retirement, began to pull back from Indigo. “I was effectively out of running the business for two years,” she says.
She retired in August 2023, but resumed her post just a month later.
Since then, the company has faced some reputational setbacks.
In November 2023, a downtown Toronto Indigo store was defaced by protesters, who alleged that the HESEG foundation — a charity founded by Reisman and her husband — was funding Israeli military action by providing funds to non-Israeli “lone soldiers” enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces.
(HESEG describes itself as “a philanthropic organization dedicated to empowering and supporting exceptional individuals recognized as lone soldiers during their military service in their educational and professional journeys.”)
Later, court documents revealed that Reisman had spoken directly with the Toronto police chief following the incident, which some say was a misuse of her power.
Reisman declined to comment on either incident, instead referring the Star to a Sep. 27 statement, which reads: “The claim of this group, that Indigo or Heather Reisman privately funds the Israeli Defense Forces, is categorically untrue.”
Back to the books
Today, Reisman is focused on returning the company to its roots.
Before Indigo was founded, she wanted the store to have “the feeling of an independent bookseller” combined with “the dynamism of the large assortment.”
Faced with growing competition from e-commerce giants like Amazon, Indigo expanded its offering beyond books, to lifestyle goods like candles, toys, blankets and pyjamas.
The bookstore perhaps strayed too far from its original ethos, Reisman says.
“We needed to re-anchor as being the book lovers’ destination of choice, reinvest in the happy place of book lovers,” she adds. “Books were the core, and I think it got a little bit away from that core.”
Lisa Hutcheson, managing partner of the J.C. Williams retail consulting group, agrees with the approach. “They had kind of tipped a little too much to the lifestyle. Pulling the needle back (seems) like the right thing to do.”
Cutting down on non-book offerings forms the core of an “indie bookstore strategy” that is increasingly being adopted by large bookstore chains all over the world.
The strategy includes selling a curated collection of books, rather than all books; emphasizing discovery of literature rather than predictability; and leaving individual stores to handle the placement and curation of books.
James Daunt, managing director of the U.K.-based Waterstones and chief executive of U.S.-based Barnes & Noble, has had success with the strategy, and today is credited with “saving” the two bookstore chains.
Indeed, Reisman’s decision to focus on books “was probably a timely move,” Hutcheson says.
“At this moment it just does seem that there is that desire for the return of the bookstore … We’re seeing a lot of indie bookstores popping up and thrift (bookstores),” Hutcheson says. “That is becoming very trendy again as well.”
A cure for tech addiction
After years of being under siege from the tech giants, there are signs that Indigo’s recovery may lie in a growing wave of consumers who are tired of the online world and want more authentic experiences.
“We just finished a huge number of focus groups, and everybody says, ‘I wish I was less addicted to my technology and that I spent more time reading,’ ” says Reisman. “We’re all addicted, right? So can Indigo be the anti-addiction? Can we be ‘the balance?’ ”
To achieve this goal Reisman wants to host more author events, as well as events focusing on specific subject matters, such as history, well-being, democracy and geopolitics.
Consumers are so invested in their electronic devices that analysts expected them to start reading literature mostly online, says Hutcheson. On the contrary, “we’ve seen that people are still wanting the physical book,” she adds.
Some 79 per cent of books sold in Canada in 2023 were physical copies, according to the 2023 Canadian Book Consumer Study.
A physical book is an experience in itself, agrees Reisman.
“Before you’ve read a book … it’s pretty much a commodity,” she says. But once you’ve bought a book, it becomes “a combination of what the author wrote and what you experienced reading the book and what was happening in your life,” she adds. “It becomes an artifact.”
So far, Reisman says, things are looking up.
“It’s almost as if people have rediscovered the joy of a bookstore at the same time that we are really reinvesting in the experience.”
