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Photo: R. Ragu

Bookmark this place Hemu Ramaiah at Landmark

The business she started in over 5,200 square feet of basement, has spawned stores all over the country and recently completed 20 years with a kind of success that lives up to it’s name: Landmark.

“I always knew I wanted to work in a book shop or something to do with books and interacting with people,” says Hemu Ramaiah, CEO, Landmark. She learnt more about literature hanging out at the Taj Book Shop than from her course in Stella Maris College. “My friend who was running the shop moved to Bombay and I got her job. I started working the day I finished college in 1978. I was 20.”

In the next 10 years, she started more concept book-stores in other hotels. It wasn’t easy to get funding for retail. So Hemu got her NRI-brother Nataraj Ramaiah to invest. Since they couldn’t afford retail space in Mount Road, they settled for a basement in one of the “side roads”. “Nungambakkam High Road was actually boondocks.”

Books used to be sold from behind counters when Landmark opened in 1987. “If you wanted to see a coffee table book, the fellow will not even show it to you, he’ll say: Wanna buy? Otherwise: ‘No, don’t put your fingerprints on my book!’”

Hemu wanted to change this, encourage browsing, empower the customer. In between her work to set up the store,

Hemu used to head to Rangis for a quick bite. That’s where she met Jai, her husband, who now handles the finances for Landmark. “He used to run Rangis with his cousins. He’s a chartered accountant. We got married in 1989 but then he didn’t come into the business for six years. And when we got married, everyone used to joke: One thing we can say about your children is that they are going be well fed and well-read,” she laughs. The biggest challenge in the first decade was to break the monopoly of distributors.In the early nineties, during the foreign exchange crisis, imports became impossible unless stock was paid for in advance.

“There was panic in the industry. That was when we took the call to borrow money. We went into distribution houses and cleaned out all the stuff. We set up a little warehouse space and went into overdraft to buy stock. So, if you wanted to buy a great book in the next nine months, you had to come to Landmark to get it. We started air-freight in 1994.”

When the store launched the music section in 1996, it released an ad: “You can now browse with your eyes closed.” The market opened up, the store grew. By 1997, Hemu had decided that large-format was the way to go. Landmark signed a joint venture in Kolkata for an 18,000 sq ft store in 1999 and then, the Spencer’s Plaza store came up across 40,000 sq ft in 2001. “Maybe it was two km. from my old store but this was a standalone destination store. From day one, it was a phenomenal success. All the mall guys started coming to us and then we got Bangalore, which is our flagship store today.”

This 45,000 sq ft store was launched in early 2004; by the end of 2005, the Tatas wanted a piece of the pie. So Nataraj sold his 76 per cent stake and Hemu retained her 24 per cent as the CEO of the company.

Does she plan to retire now that she’s 50? “If I have done a good job, I should be dispensable right? Which I think I have done to a large extent. It is important to me that the brand is remembered. Tomorrow if I drop dead, get run over by a bus or die of a cardiac arrest or whatever, the brand shouldn’t get touched. It should live on.”

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