![]() Again, a surprising turnabout: Maybe the store was going to turn out more stubbornly old-fashioned than the pundit. I don’t recall the last time I packed a travel book for travel. To the right of the jigsaw puzzles is a row of cash registers, next to a surprisingly complete selection of travel books. Which I would estimate covers about a third the sprawling footprint of the store it replaces. There are some open spaces on the second floor, but overall the chain’s designers and the store’s manager seem intent on putting more product into each square foot of the new space. The first surprise at the new Indigo is how packed it is. The first sight that greeted me was the wall of jigsaw puzzles you see above. I suppose that one thing’s for sure, you can’t call it stuff. (Does anyone call it cannabis in real life? “Honey, can you pick up some cannabis at the Tokyo Smoke?” I defer to the product’s client base on this. I just wandered in off Rideau St., a main downtown artery, which now has significant Indigo frontage between the Farm Boy grocer and the Tokyo Smoke “cannabis” shop. ![]() These mall bookstores often have a few entrances, so it’s hard to be sure which is the designer’s front door, the one where your inspiring display experience is supposed to start. And crow’s-feet-y.īut how far does Ruis, who’s also said “the days of just browsing bookshelves are behind us,” plan to go? I realized my city would soon get a test case when this sign appeared, at the end of September, in a window of the old Chapters downtown Ottawa flagship store at Rideau and Sussex, now shuttered: I know whenever I head out to pick up the latest from Charlotte Gray or Elamin Abdelmahmoud, I sometimes get a little peckish. There were also references to “a $450 Ooni pizza oven, a vegan collagen face mist or a set of stemless wine glasses.” Which, you know, fair game. “It’s not four or five things it’s about 400 or 500 that we’re busily beavering away, trying to bring them to market,” he says, sitting in a boardroom at Indigo’s Toronto offices. Ruis is planning a major expansion in categories such as cookware, tech gadgets and beauty products. Nobody’s running a monastery here.īut that Globe interview suggested Ruis just might be interested in kicking things up a notch. And it’s not like indie bookshops don’t sell pens or T-shirts or zany hangables too. ![]() They get excited over your choices, they have suggestions, there’s a good chance they’ve read in the subject area you’re interested in. Staff at every Indigo or Chapters I’ve ever visited are clearly book people. The grace of Indigo under Reisman was that, while books slowly ceded ground to tchotchkes over the years, they always seemed to be putting up an honourable fight. There’s a figure-ground dilemma you have to deal with sometimes. And some days, it can feel like the books are what’s among the throw rugs. ![]() The chain’s stores already, as regular shoppers know, feature many throw rugs and tea cozies among the books. The topic of “stuff” came up because Ruis - successor to Indigo Books & Music founding CEO Heather Reisman - was merrily chattering away to the Globe reporter about all the, well, stuff he wanted to start stocking in Indigo and Chapters stores. Everyone’s got too much stuff,” Indigo’s new CEO Peter Ruis told the Globe and Mail in September. ![]()
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