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I took myself to my own happy place, which was a bookstore.
Heather Reisman watched Canadian bookstores disappear one by one. It was the mid 1990s, and local bookstores were closing as global competitors changed how books were sold. Reisman, a management consultant from Montréal who had spent sixteen years leading Paradigm Consulting, decided she wasn’t going to just watch it happen.
She founded Indigo Books & Music with backing from Onex Corporation and set out to create something more than a retail chain. Indigo offered light, space, and community with cafés where people lingered, armchairs that invited hours of browsing, and the familiar smell of paper instead of plastic. While others focused only on sales and margins, Reisman treated bookstores as part of Canada’s cultural fabric, and she stayed committed to that from day one.
Her timing was unusual. The federal government had just blocked the U.S. chain Borders from entering Canada on cultural protection grounds, yet domestic retailers were still faltering. Where many saw a shrinking sector, Reisman recognized an opportunity. In 2001 she led Indigo’s merger with Chapters Inc., combining two struggling competitors into a national bookseller. Critics called the move consolidation, but she considered it preservation. Jobs stayed in place, publishers kept their distribution channels, and a Canadian bookseller remained in the market as digital reading accelerated.
Reisman also understood that preservation did not mean resisting change. While debates swirled about whether digital reading in the form of e-books would be the future of reading, she launched Kobo in 2009, a Toronto based e-reading platform aimed at competing with Amazon’s Kindle. Within two years Kobo had reached more than one hundred countries. In 2011, she sold the company to Rakuten for over three hundred million dollars. It became a rare Canadian tech success and one of the few digital products to come from a retail company.
Reisman continued focusing on building systems and spaces that support learning and innovation. Through the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation she has contributed millions to underfunded schools, putting books into the hands of children who might otherwise go without.. With her husband, Gerald Schwartz, she helped establish the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus at the University of Toronto, a $100 million investment supporting research in AI ethics and biomedical discovery.
The company also faced one of its most difficult periods during the COVID years. Store closures, supply chain issues, and a major cybersecurity breach in 2023 left Indigo struggling to find its footing. Reisman stepped down as CEO in 2023 and later retired from the board, but instability continued. She returned in 2024 to steady the business and acknowledged publicly that Indigo had “lost its way,” refocusing the company on the values that originally defined it. Her return marked a reset, a return to fundamentals that shaped what Indigo still represents today.
Today, a child opens a donated book in a Halifax classroom. A researcher at the Innovation Campus works on algorithms designed with ethical guardrails. Someone settles into an Indigo armchair on a Tuesday afternoon and chooses a story to take home. These moments come from the same place: long-term work put in by Heather Reisman. They show how building a country also means strengthening the places where ideas and innovation are developed. When global forces threatened to narrow Canada’s cultural space, Reisman did more than protect what remained. She built what was missing and showed what real builders add to a country.
