Indigo

Indigo Books & Music Inc. is the largest retailer of books in Canada. The company's stores, operating under the names Indigo Books, Music & More, The World's Biggest Bookstore, and Coles, are located throughout Canada. Indigo operates 88 superstores and 179 mall stores. Indigo also maintains an online presence through the Web site chapters.indigo.ca, which sells books, gifts, videos, and DVDs. During the 1990s, the business of selling books in Canada changed dramatically. The number of independent bookstores dwindled, their presence diminished by the rise of large chains of superstores designed to eradicate competitors. Within the space of a few short years, two retail giants emerged as the only contenders for market dominance. On one side stood Larry Stevenson, the chief executive officer of Chapters, Inc., Canada's largest retailer of books. On the other side, Heather Reisman grappled with Stevenson, using her company, Indigo, to fight for market supremacy. The effect of their battle on the industry was profound. John Lorinc, a reporter for the Report on Business Magazine , gave his assessment of the aftermath of fight between Stevenson and Reisman in the October 2002 issue of the magazine. In reference to Canada's retail book industry, Lorinc wrote that "no other sizable developed country has let ownership of bookselling become so concentrated." The industry was, he added, "The closest thing to an unregulated monopoly in Canada's private sector." Reisman, the principal agent of change in the process of industry consolidation, began her professional career as a social worker before entering the corporate world. She co-founded a management consulting firm, Paradigm Consulting, in 1979, earning the esteem and making the contacts that eventually put her in charge of a soft drink bottling company named Cott Corporation. At Cott, Reisman solidified her reputation, leading the company toward double-digit annual growth during the early 1990s. Her success at Cott was convincing, but in the midst of the rousing financial growth she made an error that cut short her career at the bottling company. In 1993, Reisman made a profit of C$1.6 million selling Cott stock options without filing the required insider trading documents within the ten-day period mandated by the Canadian government. Reisman acknowledged she was several weeks late in filling the documents, attributing the oversight to a back injury that kept her away from her office. Cott's chairman, Gerry Pencer, responded to the situation by hiring another executive in 1994, Dave Nichol, that cast Reisman to the sidelines. Reisman left Cott and re-emerged in a different industry, endeavoring to take on the retail market for books. Across the border, a giant book retailer named Borders was enjoying the rewards of market preeminence. Reisman hoped to graft the U.S. success of Borders onto a Canadian company and grab hold of the industry. She enlisted the help of partners, convincing coffee mogul Michael Bregman, owner of Second Cup, and a book retailer in Toronto named Edward Borins to back her entry into the Canadian book-selling market. The plan was to combine the reputations and the finances of the trio, underpinned by Borders' well-regarded ordering technology, and invade Canada through a minority stake in Borders. The plan might have worked, but when a corporate consultant and financier named Larry Stevenson entered the market with the same intention as Reisman, her plan unraveled. Stevenson enlisted the support of David Peterson, the former minister of Ontario, naming him chairman of his company, Chapters, Inc. Canada's federal government generally frowned upon the idea of a foreign company insinuating itself into Canadian culture, a mindset that presumably worked in Stevenson's favor, or at least one that Stevenson attempted to exploit. Reisman's venture failed to get off the ground, its launch aborted by the greater appeal of the Peterson-led Chapters in the Canadian gove