Calgary-based Local Laundry, an online custom clothing retailer, is in growth mode these days.
Recently, it purchased two brands CDN, in Kelowna, and WEST, in Calgary, and it’s working on more deals in the future.
Connor Curran, CEO, who also calls himself Chief Laundry Folder, said “we are moving and grooving.”
“The last couple of years we really have been kind of figuring out things. A lot of the clothing companies, particularly the smaller ones, really did well during the pandemic because everyone had lots of money and us included, we did great and we thought we were going to take over the world. We invested in ourselves and built the team,” said Curran.
“We thought it would continue to grow and grow and grow. And then in 2022 and 2023 not the best years and we saw a lot of clothing companies kind of struggle, ourselves included and that’s where we had to make some changes and figure things out.
“One of the areas we decided to focus on was our most profitable sector which is actually creating custom clothing. So we started working with corporate teams – banks, energy companies – essentially big businesses with lots of money but didn’t have a great brand that wanted to leverage our brand for employee engagement, consumer engagement, that kind of thing. That really kind of kept us afloat in the last couple of years.
“Now we’re on a mission. We’re really inspired by Bernard Arnault from LVMH and how he took brands with great values, great communities, but just underperformed financially, and he brought them all together under one umbrella to create the luxury behemoth that LVMH is. I think there’s a great opportunity to do that with local clothing companies whose owners are burned out but they put blood, sweat and tears into building these brands and building these communities, with a great social following, great email list, great retail partners, but they just don’t want to do it anymore.”
Curran said the vision is to acquire these local clothing companies with little to no cash down all through financing and build a group of local clothing companies.
“Together we can share resources, we can share assets, we can share knowledge, team members and the brands can continue to grow autonomously. We can help each other learn and help each other grow. So that’s why we’re on this acquisition path,” he said.
“We’ve acquired two companies already and we have about three or four in the pipeline.”
Curran said Local Laundry is looking for local online clothing companies across the country and eventually into the United States.
“We want to focus on online and we also want to focus on custom.”
Local Laundry started in Calgary in 2015.
