Waterstone’s

Waterstones

Type	Private
Industry	Retail Bookshop
Founded	Old Brompton Road, London, 1982
Founder	Tim Waterstone
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Number of locations	275 stores (Oct 2013)
Area served	UK, Ireland, Belgium, The Netherlands
Key people	James Daunt (MD)
Products	Books
Number of employees	4,500
Parent	A&NN Capital Fund Management, owned by Alexander Mamut
Website	www.waterstones.com

Waterstones, formerly Waterstone's, is a British book retailer that operates 275 stores and was employing around 3,500 staff in the UK and Europe in February 2014. Established in 1982 by Tim Waterstone, after whom the company was named, the bookseller expanded rapidly until being sold in 1993 to W H Smith. Bought again in 1998 by Waterstone, EMI & Advent International, the company was taken under the umbrella of HMV Group, which later merged the Dillons and Ottakar's brands into the company.

Following several poor sets of results for the group, HMV put the chain up for sale. In May 2011, it was announced that A&NN Capital Fund Management, owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, had bought the chain and appointed James Daunt as managing director.

As well as the Waterstones brand, the company owns the London bookseller Hatchards, and Irish shop Hodges Figgis. An average sized Waterstones store sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products. The bookseller has previously had concession agreements with Costa Coffee, Paperchase and Starbucks in some stores, but since 2012 has introduced its own Café W brand. For a time, Waterstones sold eReaders, including in 2012 partnering with Amazon to sell the Amazon Kindle, but has since pulled out of this market due to commercial reasons.

The chain was founded by Tim Waterstone after he was fired by W H Smith, having failed to establish W H Smith as a brand in the United States. Taking the £6000 redundancy payout, he set up his first store in Old Brompton Road, Kensington with the ambition of creating a 'different breed of bookshop', using techniques he had seen in the United States. He used literary authors in front of store displays and employed highly literate staff.