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A multi-million-dollar renovation at Orchard Park Shopping Centre will see a dramatic transformation at one of the mall’s flagship retailers.
Renovations will soon begin at Chapters Kelowna, as the store’s parent company, Indigo Books and Music Inc., rebrands the location to Indigo Kelowna.
According to Kate Gregory, a senior public relations manager at Indigo, the renovations will begin this month, and are expected to wrap up sometime in the summer.
Gregory says the new Indigo store will have the “same staff and service,” as the Chapters, but feature more “toys, gifts, fashion accessories, stationery and home décor” than Chapters currently does.
She says the store will also remain open during the renovations.
A City of Kelowna building permit for the project pegs its cost at $1.9 million.
Matthew Smith, the director of operations at the design firm undertaking the renovation, says the nearly $2 million price tag is a “fairly typical” one for this type of project.
“This construction cost is honest, but it didn’t shock me,” he said.
Chapters and Indigo were once separate companies competing for dominance in the Canadian book market. That competition ended in 2001 when the two companies merged, after Indigo CEO Heather Reisman acquired nearly three-quarters of Chapters’ shares in a hostile corporate takeover.
In recent years, Reisman has focused on transforming Indigo into the “world’s first cultural department store,” by focusing on new, exclusive product lines including specialty toys, gifts, and “lifestyle enhancing products.”
As of July 1, 2017, Indigo operated 89 superstores under the banners Chapters and Indigo, and 122 “small-format” stores, under the banners Coles, Indigospirit, SmithBooks, and The Book Company.
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