Polare

» see polare.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In April 2012 an investment company called ProCures picked up two Dutch bookselling chains inside two days. Selexyz came out of a bankruptcy on 3 April and De Slegte was bought on 4 April. The plan was to fold them into each other. For a while the shops carried both names stacked up on the fascia. On 27 June 2013 the whole thing was relaunched as Polare, a made-up word built off the Italian stella polare, the pole star.

The chain it replaced was not generic. Selexyz and De Slegte between them held shops that Dutch cities had been walking into for a century, trading under names like Scheltema in Amsterdam, Donner in Rotterdam, Broese in Utrecht, Dominicanen in Maastricht, which is a bookshop inside a thirteenth century church. All of them were repainted as Polare. The logic was the standard retail consolidation of the period: one brand, one loyalty scheme, one webshop, and the local history filed as redundant signage.

The money never worked. There were reorganizations in 2012 and again in 2013, about 195 jobs between them, and another round planned for 2014 before anything went wrong. What went wrong was supply. In January 2014 Centraal Boekhuis, which is how books physically reach Dutch bookshops, stopped delivering because Polare had not been paying. The rent was also behind. On 28 January every Dutch branch closed its doors.

After that the sequence is short. The court granted a suspension of payments on 11 February. The shops reopened on the 19th while the administrator talked to buyers. On 24 February the Amsterdam court converted the suspension into bankruptcy, and the administrator, Kees van de Meent, said what everybody had worked out already: there was no future for this as a group.

~ the dossier ~

~ the belgian half and the black screen ~

The Belgian half did not go down with it. Those branches sat inside a different legal entity and stayed open, continuing the De Slegte secondhand trade, although the shares belonged to the Dutch estate. So for a stretch in February the strange situation held where polare.nl could still take orders for secondhand and discount books, because the stock was in Belgium and the Belgian company was not bankrupt.

Then that stopped too. On 19 February, the same day the Dutch shops unlocked their doors again, the website went black. Visitors to polare.nl were redirected to offline.polare.nl, a subdomain whose entire job was to be the word offline. ProCures was running the same play at its other failing chain that month, where Free Record Shop had been reduced to a store locator.

~ the week it came apart ~

Selling a bookshop chain in pieces should be hard. It was not, because the pieces had better names than the whole. The Eindhoven shop went first, reopening as Van Piere inside the Libris group, and from there it came apart steadily: Novamedia bought the Amsterdam branch and restored Scheltema, the Rotterdam staff crowdfunded 386,050 euros to buy their own shop and put Donner back over the door, Maastricht raised 51,000 euros the same way for Boekhandel Dominicanen. Nijmegen returned to Dekker v.d. Vegt, Utrecht to Broese, Leiden to Kooyker, Den Bosch to Adr. Heinen.

Not all of them made it. Haarlem shut for good on 23 March with no buyer at all. On 1 April the curtain came down on three more, Arnhem among them, where a local plan to buy the shop and reopen it as Gelderse Boekhandel had been reported as advanced and then was not. The retail organization Euretco ended up involved in restarting close to half the chain.

The obvious reading is that the rebrand killed it, and that is too neat. The debts were there before the new sign went up, and the supplier cutoff would have happened to a chain called anything. What the rebrand did was make the damage legible. When the group failed, the brand had no residual value at all, because it was eight months old and meant nothing, while the names it had painted over were worth enough that total strangers put their own money in to get them back.

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