HEATHER REISMAN

Heather Reisman made headlines this past fall for cutting her retirement short to return as the CEO of Indigo Books and Music. Reisman founded the company in 1996 and, over nearly 30 years, built it into Canada’s biggest bookstore chain. She initially stepped down as CEO in September 2022. Almost a year later — less than a week before her 75th birthday — she left the board.

“Deciding when it is time to move on is one of the toughest decisions a founder must make, but I know this is the right moment for me,” she said in a release on Aug. 22, 2023. Three weeks later, she returned as CEO. “I’m back because, notwithstanding everybody’s best intentions, Indigo took a journey off-brand,” she said, after her successor, Peter Ruis, abruptly resigned.

Reisman reportedly has no immediate plans to look for another successor but has learned from the experience.

Born in Montreal, Reisman is one of Canada’s most prominent advocates of literacy. At age 11, she saved her allowance to join a book-of-the-month club, she told Canadian Business in 2008, and her love of reading is still strong.

Reisman studied social work at Mcgill University and was a youth caseworker before starting a business consultancy and briefly heading up the soft drink company Cott Corporation. Reisman opened the first Indigo store in Burlington, Ont., in 1997. She followed the launch of Indigo by taking over Chapters in 2001 and co-founded Kobo, a global e-reader maker, in 2009.

Fresh out of her brief retirement, Reisman reportedly assured publishers she was happy to be back in an October 2023 online town hall meeting. “To the extent that over the last while, somehow books felt like they were not the heart and soul (of the company), that we were not living our mission, which is to inspire reading, I can assure you that every single minute of every single day, we are focused on exactly that.”