Retail
"Thrift stores are kind of my haven,” says Tracy Stewart. And it makes sense—she found solace in them after going through breast cancer treatment a dozen years ago. There was chemotherapy, radiation, surgery and then post-mastectomy reconstruction. But the implants...
I last talked to Zack Eberwein two-and-a-half years ago. Not too much has changed for me since then, honestly. For him, it might as well have been a decade. The then-23-year-old was tinkering in the basement of UBC’s Institute for Computing...
From Victoria to St. John’s, COVID-19 has made life difficult for main streets across the country. Cities need to give struggling retail and commercial businesses a helping hand. But to make the right decisions when it comes to economic recovery, Andy Yan says, they also need good data. To that end, Yan helped create the Main Street Data Primer: A Resource for Policymakers, Main Street Stakeholders and Urban Researchers...
At a Banff business conference more than a decade ago, a guy walked up to Vancouver tech entrepreneur David Gratton and literally offered to buy the shirt off his back. “It had an embroidered picture of an old airplane that...
Blaine McNamee had already brought the dead back to life once in B.C.’s retail world. Then the pandemic came. McNamee is the guy who took over the empty storefront that had been home to the cherished Wonderbucks on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive—an...
“One of our company values is to evolve. We just thought, OK, we’ve got to work with what we got—and once evolved, we can make things happen,” says CJ King, vice-president, omni-channel, of outdoor apparel brand Arc’teryx Equipment. The North...
A Maple Ridge liquor store has reportedly become the first B.C. retail outlet to unionize during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seventy-five percent of the staff at JAK’s Beer Wine Spirits’ Maple Ridge location voted to join the Burnaby-based Service Employees International Union...
Some entrepreneurs create ideas; some ideas create entrepreneurs. In Caroline Bertrand’s case, it’s too early to tell, but her first endeavour seems to fall firmly in the latter category. Even at a young age, as a gymnast growing up in...
As COVID-19 transforms the business world, a new study shows how it’s reshaping main streets in our major cities. The Block Reports survey puts seven commercial hubs in B.C. and Ontario under the microscope. The authors looked at data such as business closures, foot traffic pre- and post-COVID, the proportion of independent businesses and the size of the local residential population...
Steven Sal Debus has a long history of innovating in the Canadian fashion industry. In the mid-1990s, he took his Brock University business degree and launched Modrobes, the very Canadian, extremely popular pants, through a class project. That empire eventually...