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How a Canadian Chain Is Reinventing Book Selling

By Alexandra Alter

About a decade ago, Heather Reisman, the chief executive of Canada’s largest bookstore chain, was having tea with the novelist Margaret Atwood when Ms. Atwood inadvertently gave her an idea for a new product. Ms. Atwood announced that she planned to go home, put on a pair of cozy socks and curl up with a book. Ms. Reisman thought about how appealing that sounded. Not long after, her company, Indigo, developed its own brand of plush “reading socks.” They quickly became one of Indigo’s signature gift items.

“Last year, all my friends got reading socks,” said Arianna Huffington, the HuffPost cofounder and a friend of Ms. Reisman’s, who also gave the socks as gifts to employees at her organization Thrive. “Most people don’t have reading socks — not like Heather’s reading socks.”

Over the last few years, Indigo has designed dozens of other products, including beach mats, scented candles, inspirational wall art, Mason jars, crystal pillars, bento lunchboxes, herb growing kits, copper cheese knife sets, stemless champagne flutes, throw pillows and scarves.

It may seem strange for a bookstore chain to be developing and selling artisanal soup bowls and organic cotton baby onesies. But Indigo’s approach seems not only novel but crucial to its success and longevity. The superstore concept, with hulking retail spaces stocking 100,000 titles, has become increasingly hard to sustain in the era of online retail, when it’s impossible to match Amazon’s vast selection.

Indigo is experimenting with a new model, positioning itself as a “cultural department store” where customers who wander in to browse through books often end up lingering as they impulsively shop for cashmere slippers and crystal facial rollers, or a knife set to go with a new Paleo cookbook. Over the past few years, Ms. Reisman has reinvented Indigo as a Goop-like, curated lifestyle brand, with sections devoted to food, health and wellness, and home décor.

Ms. Reisman is now importing Indigo’s approach to the United States. Last year, Indigo opened its first American outpost, at a luxury mall in Millburn, N.J., and she eventually plans to open a cluster of Indigos in the Northeast. Indigo’s ascendance is all the more notable given the challenges that big bookstore chains have faced in the United States. Borders, which once had more than 650 locations, filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Barnes & Noble now operates 627 stores, down from 720 in 2010, and the company put itself up for sale last year. Lately, it has been opening smaller stores, including an 8,300-square-foot outlet in Fairfax County, Va.

“Cross-merchandising is Retail 101, and it’s hard to do in a typical bookstore,” said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, which analyzes the book industry. “Indigo found a way to create an extra aura around the bookbuying experience, by creating a physical extension of what you’re reading about.”

The atmosphere is unabashedly intimate, cozy and feminine — an aesthetic choice that also makes commercial sense, given that women account for some 60 percent of book buyers. A section called “The Joy of the Table” stocks Indigobrand ceramics, glassware and acacia wood serving platters with the cookbooks. The home décor section has pillows and throws, woven baskets, vases and scented candles. There’s a subsection called “In Her Words,” which features idea-driven books and memoirs by women. An area labeled “A Room of Her Own” looks like a lushdressing room, with vegan leather purses, soft gray shawls, a velvet chair, scarves and journals alongside art, design and fashion books.

Books still account for just over 50 percent of Indigo’s sales and remain the central draw; the New Jersey store stocks around 55,000 titles. But they also serve another purpose: providing a window into consumers’ interests, hobbies, desires and anxieties, which makes it easier to develop and sell related products.

Publishing executives, who have watched with growing alarm as Barnes & Noble has struggled, have responded enthusiastically to Ms. Reisman’s strategy. “Heather pioneered and perfected the art of integrating books and nonbook products,” Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, said in an email.

Ms. Reisman has made herself and her own tastes and interests central to the brand. The front of the New Jersey store features a section labeled “Heather’s Picks,” with a display table covered with dozens of titles. A sign identifies her as the chain’s “founder, C.E.O., Chief Booklover and the Heather in Heather’s Picks.” She appears regularly at author signings and store events, and has interviewed prominent authors like Malcolm Gladwell, James Comey, Sally Field, Bill Clinton and Nora Ephron.

When Ms. Reisman opened the first Indigo store in Burlington, Ontario, in 1997, she had already run her own consulting firm and later served as president of a soft drink and beverage company, Cott. Still, bookselling is an idiosyncratic industry, and many questioned whether Indigo could compete with Canada’s biggest bookseller, Chapters. Skepticism dissolved a few years later when Indigo merged with Chapters, inheriting its fleet of national stores. The company now has more than 200 outlets across Canada, including 89 “superstores.” Indigo opened its first revamped concept store in 2016.

The new approach has proved lucrative: In its 2017 fiscal year, the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion Canadian for the first time. In its 2018 fiscal year, Indigo reported a revenue increase of nearly $60 million Canadian over the previous year, making it the most profitable year in the chain’s history.

The company’s dominance in Canada doesn’t guarantee it will thrive in the United States, where it has to compete not only with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but with a resurgent wave of independent booksellers. After years of decline, independent stores have rebounded, with some 2,470 locations, up from 1,651 a decade ago, according to the American Booksellers Association. And Amazon has expanded into the physical retail market, with around 20 bookstores across the United States.

Ms. Reisman acknowledges that the company faces challenges as it expands southward. Still, she’s optimistic, and is already scouting locations for a second store near New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01

T E X T

Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment.

Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work.

The coronavirus upended the lives of millions of college students. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that men have been hit particularly hard — accounting for roughly three-fourths of pandemic-driven dropouts — and depicted an accelerating crisis in male enrollment.

A closer look at historical trends and the labor market reveals a more complex picture, one in which women keep playing catch-up in an economy structured to favor men.

In many ways, the college gender imbalance is not new. Women have outnumbered men on campus since the late 1970s. The ratio of female to male undergraduates increased much more from 1970 to 1980 than from 1980 to the present. And the numbers haven’t changed much in recent decades. In 1992, 55 percent of college students were women. By 2019, the number had nudged up to 57.4 percent.

While the shift in the college gender ratio is often characterized as men “falling behind,” men are actually more likely to go to college today than they were when they were the majority, many decades ago. In 1970, 32 percent of men 18 to 24were enrolled in college, a level that was most likely inflated by the opportunity to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. That percentage dropped to 24 percent in 1978 and then steadily grew to a stable 37 percent to 39 percent over the last decade.

The gender ratio mostly changed because female enrollment increased even faster, more than doubling over the last half-century.

Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported. Generally, admissions officials prefer to limit the disparity to 55 percent female and 45 percent male. Their reason not to let the gender ratio drift further toward 2 to 1 is straightforward: Such a ratio would most likely cause a decrease in applications.

In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: “Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”

The raw numbers don’t take into account the varying value of college degrees. Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the professors in those fields remain overwhelmingly male.

Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don’t pay well.

The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.

None of this diminishes the significance of the male decrease in college enrollment and graduation. Educators view the male-driven dive in community college enrollment over the last 18 months as a calamity. The pandemic confirmed what was already known. Higher socioeconomic classes are deeply embedded in college and will bear considerable cost and inconvenience to stay there, even if it means watching lectures on a laptop in the room above your parent’s garage and missing a season of parties and football games.

For other people, college attendance is far more fragile. It does not define their identities and is not as important as earning a steady paycheck or starting and nurturing a family. In a time of crisis,it can be delayed — but the reality is that people who drop out of college are statistically unlikely to complete a degree.

Last year, women were less likely than men to leave community college, despite their disproportionate responsibility for caregiving and domestic work, because they no doubt understood the bleak long-term job prospects for women without a credential.

www.nytimes.com/Sept.9,2021

T E X T

I Used to Fear Being a Nobody. Then I Left

Social Media.

By Bianca Brooks

“What’s happening?”

I stare blankly at the little box as I try to think of something clever for my first tweet. I settle on what’s at the top of my mind: “My only #fear is being a nobody.” How could I know this exchange would begin a dialogue that would continue nearly every day for the next nine years of my life?

I began using Twitter in 2010 as a newly minted high school freshman. Though it began as a hub for my quirky adolescent thoughts, over the years it became an archive of my emotional and intellectual voice — a kind of virtual display for the evolution of my politics and artistic identity. Butafter nine years, it was time to close the archive. My wanting to share my every waking thought became eclipsed by a desire for an increasingly rare commodity — a private life.

Though I thought disappearing from social media would be as simple as logging off, my refusal to post anything caused a bit of a stir among my small but loyal following. I began to receive emails from strangers asking me where I had gone and when I would return. One message read: “Not to be over familiar, but you have to come back eventually. You’re a writer after all. How will we read your writing?” Another follower inquired, “Where will you go?”

The truth is I have not gone anywhere. I am, in fact, more present than ever

Over time, I have begun to sense these messages reveal more than a lack of respect for privacy. I realize that to many millennials, a life without a social media presence is not simply a private life; it is no life at all: We possess a widespread, genuine fear of obscurity.

When I consider the near-decade I have spent on social media, this worry makes sense. As with many in my generation, Twitter was my entry into conversations happening on a global scale; long before my byline graced any publication, tweeting was how I felt a part of the world. Twitter functions much like an echo chamber dependent on likes and retweets, and gaining notoriety is as easy as finding someone to agree with you. For years I poured my opinions, musings and outrage onto my timeline, believing I held an indispensable place in a vital sociopolitical experiment.

But these passionate, public observations were born of more than just a desire to speak my mind — I was measuring my individual worth in constant visibility. Implicit in my follower’s question “Where will you go?” is the resounding question “How will we know where you’ve gone?” Privacy is considered a small exchange for the security of being well known and well liked.

After all, a private life boasts no location markers or story updates. The idea that the happenings of our lives would be constrained to our immediate families, friends and real-life communities is akin to social death in a world measured by followers, views, likes and shares.

I grow weary when I think of this as the new normal for what is considered to be a fruitful personal life. Social media is no longer a mere public extension of our private socialization; it has become a replacement for it. What happens to our humanity when we relegate our real lives to props for the performance of our virtual ones?

For one, a predominantly online existence can lull us into a dubious sense of having enacted concrete change, simply because of a tweet or Instagram post. As “hashtag activism” has obscured longstanding traditions of assembly and protest, there’s concern that a failure to transition from the keyboard to in-person organization will effectively stall or kill the momentum of political movements. (See: Occupy Wall Street.)

The sanctity of our most intimate experiences is also diminished. My grandfather Charles Shaw — a notable musician whose wisdoms and jazz scene tales I often shared on Twitter — passed away last year. Rather than take adequate time to privately mourn the loss of his giant influence in my life alongside those who loved him most, I quickly posted a lengthy tribute to him to my followers. At the time I thought, “How will they remember him if I don’t acknowledge his passing?”

Perhaps at the root of this anxiety over being forgotten is an urgent question of how one ought to form a legacy; with the rise of automation, a widening wealth gap and an unstable political climate, it is easy to feel unimportant. It is almost as if the world is too big and we are much too small to excel in it in any meaningful way. We feel we need as many people as possible to witness our lives, so as not to be left out of a story that is being written too fast by people much more significant than ourselves.

“The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow,” the writer Anais Nin said. “This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”

I think of those words and at once any fear of obscurity is eclipsed by much deeper ones — the fear of forgoing the sacred moments of life, of never learning to be completely alone, of not bearing witness to the incredible lives of those who surround me.

I observe the world around me. It is big and moving fast. “What’s happening?” I think to myself.

I’m just beginning to find out.

From:www.nytimes.com/Oct. 1, 2019