BC Business
Button Button | BCBusiness
We live in an age of convenience, when one-stop shopping reigns supreme, from big-box department stores to Internet retail giants. And yes, stroll around Vancouver and you’ll come across a handful of businesses that seem like relics from the past: small specialty shops that remain staunchly independent and singularly focused. Think Gastown’s Button Button, the only all-button store in the country; North Vancouver’s Tea Time, which sells loose leaf teas and nothing else, not even a hot cup of Earl Grey; the Vancouver Pen Shop downtown, a fixture for pen lovers for 28 years; and Main Street’s All-Vacuum Store, still sucking up business after four decade.
How do they do it? Why are they still at it? And, more importantly, what can they teach us? Read on as a quartet of unique shop owners explains, in their own words, how they’re beating the odds to survive, and thrive, in the face of the superstore goliaths.
“It’s good business, because everybody buys a vacuum”
We’ve been in business for 40 years, and in this location for 23. When I moved here…
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“People move, and yet they come back for tea”
I like to say that we…
“Everyone laughed when I said I wanted to open a button store”
Everyone laughed when I said I wanted to open a button store. But I’d lived in lots…
“You will always, at some point, need a pen”
We don’t expect people to buy a pen every time they come in—people…