The up-and-down year at Canadian book retailer Indigo took a new twist on Thursday as CEO Peter Ruis abruptly resigned.
The company made the announcement in a media release Thursday morning, saying that Ruis has resigned from his position, effective immediately.
Indigo “thanks him for his contributions to the company and wishes him well as he moves on to new challenges in his career,” the company said in the release. “Peter has agreed to serve Indigo as a consultant for the next two months to support a smooth transition in leadership.”
After serving as company president for several years, Ruis was named CEO in August of last year as part of a transition plan that would see longtime CEO and founder Heather Reisman move up to a board-level position as chair of the company.
At the same time, the company’s chief customer and digital officer, Andrea Limbardi, was named company president alongside Ruis.
But those plans seemingly started falling apart this summer. In June, Limbardi abruptly left the company to head up fashion retailer Reitmans instead.
Half of the members of the company’s board of directors resigned in June. One of the board members who resigned, Chika Stacy Oriuwa, said she was doing so “because of her loss of confidence in board leadership and because of mistreatment.”
Reisman herself also announced at that time that she was planning to step down from any and all roles at the company she founded. That was supposed to happen this month.
It’s not immediately clear what the departure of the company’s CEO and president in a matter of months will do to those succession plans. But in the short term at least the company says chief financial officer Craig Loudon and Damien Liddle, the company’s general counsel, “will work closely with the board to provide day-to-day direction.”
Earlier this year, Indigo was hit by a devastating cyberattack that knocked its online operations and many in-store sales offline for an extended period.