BC Business
Realizing how much easier it was to shop at Ikea than at Williams Sonoma or Crate and Barrel, Joe Parenteau sought to modernize the premium dinnerware buying experience for millennials.
Parenteau sees the company he co-founded progressing as a home décor brand
Life Story: After growing up in Regina with a janitor father and warehouse worker mother, Joe Parenteau knew he just had to go somewhere the weather was a bit better. So he followed a golf scholarship to William Woods University in Missouri, where he studied accounting. He then came directly to Vancouver (again, weather), thinking he’d get a job in his field and call it a day. He did, kinda. But Bench Accounting isn’t exactly KPMG or Deloitte, and Parenteau was soon taken with how the online bookkeeping service did business.
“A lot of autonomy is given at Bench,” he says. “Tons of entrepreneurs are going to come out of there, just the way they operate it—it fuels entrepreneurship. It’s technically a bookkeeping company, but it’s really more like a tech startup.”
Parenteau already had an idea—realizing how much easier it was to shop at Ikea than at Williams Sonoma or Crate and Barrel, he sought to modernize the high-end dinnerware buying experience for millennials—and partnered with tech workers Tina Luu and Max Tims to launch Fable Home Goods in 2019. “We see it progressing into a home décor brand,” he says of his digital merchandiser. “While we sell dinnerware today, that’s not where we’re going to end; we’re just getting started. I think you’ll see us look into other components of the homeplanters, wall art, rugs. There’s a lot of space there.”
Bottom Line: Since last August, Fable has grown from the three founders to 16 employees and raised well over $1 million in funding. The only hitch? The company keeps selling out of product. Fable opened a Burnaby warehouse in April (Parenteau’s been relying on his mom’s expertise) that should permanently solve that problem. There are plans to add a storefront to it, too.