Here’s the latest scoop on The Latest Scoop – it is continuing to grow its retail brand across the country with its unique strategy of launching pop-up spaces in preparation for longer-term leases and buildouts in certain markets.
The lifestyle concept store, which offers a curated selection of pretty things for people and their homes such as fashion, home décor, accessories, furniture, stationery, giftware, was born in 2004 as a series of pop-up shops and The Latest Scoop has quickly evolved into nine permanent locations in in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary and Toronto.
The company’s first location was in Dundarave in West Vancouver.
Deborah Nichol, Founder of the brand, said the retailer has a total of 12 locations currently. The most recent is in Woodgrove Centre in Nanaimo. Prior to that it opened in CF Market Mall in Calgary and CF Chinook Centre in Calgary. It has also opened in Mayfair Shopping Centre in Victoria. Guildford Town Centre in Surrey, BC, and the CF Toronto Eaton Centre were also opened since the pandemic began.
Nichol had been in retail for a number of years and retired many years ago to take care of her young son Adrien, who is now the brand’s CEO.
“But I missed working. I had a really popular store in town and I just missed being out in the workplace and it was a very creative business that I enjoyed and even Adrien said to me I should go back to work and open up another store,” she said. “I guess he had it in his blood at an early age.
“I had the money to go shopping and not working I had the time to go shopping for once and I couldn’t find anything I wanted. Nothing was motivating me. When I go into a store, I want to feel something. I go shopping for emotion, for experience . . . That’s why people go to brick and mortar stores. And there was nothing. It was a time when all the designers were coming out with their own stores and they all looked the same – all gray, white, black, taupe, whatever it was, there was nothing new.
“I started thinking what could I do that would fit into my lifestyle as a mom of a young child, and my husband travelled, my life was pretty busy, but not interrupt my lifestyle. So I thought a pop-up store. I would open whenever I wanted and carry whatever I wanted and open for short periods of time. This turned out to be a very successful strategy. It was definitely fun. I had no rules in my buying mix. If I felt like I wanted to carry a tennis racket, I’d carry it. Anything. There were no rules. Complete outside the box thinking, which is still our strategy today.
“We would sell out after two or three weeks basically.”
The brand started opening stores for longer periods of time because of customer demand. That demand continued and it led to some of its stores having permanent locations.
“What COVID has done is offered us the opportunity to get back to our roots, which is why we opened up Mayfair and Chinook and Toronto Eaton Centre in the various pop ups that were opening – to go back to our roots and have fun with the neighbourhoods that we’re in and develop and grow our ecommerce. We love ecommerce but we really love brick and mortar retail because we get to meet the customer, hear them and talk to them,” said Nichol.
“It gives us the opportunity to test market new neighbourhoods without committing to long-term leases. Should we wish to switch to long-term leases then that’s our choice at that point.”
According to the company’s website: “Our Purpose is to inspire our people and our customers to embrace their individuality through genuine interactions.
“We travel from Paris, Italy, New York, Bali, Los Angeles to Spain to uphold our standards of always having fresh new arrivals weekly, based not on brands, but on what we find to be beautiful, inspirational, and meaningful. While searching for fabulous pieces, we also bring back innovative design concepts to create beautiful stores, reset seasonally.
“When you’re here, we urge you to lose yourself in the sense of discovery. We want you to have fun, laugh, connect and most importantly, fall in love with your wardrobe and your home.”
Nichol said opening a new store is a big undertaking financially and it’s a big commitment. When you open a pop up, you get to test market to see if you’re accepted by the neighbourhood. If you’re in the right location. If the store is the right size.
“You get a chance to feel it out,” she said. “It’s like a test drive. If you buy a car you want to test drive it and that’s sort of what we do with retail locations. And to be honest, we go in with full integrity of becoming full-time stores within that community and we just want to make sure that the neighbourhood understands us and we’re a good fit.
“We’re already looking at other neighbourhoods in Canada, in other provinces. And we will continue down the path of temporary stores, pop-up stores, that we hope to convert to full-time. But we’ll also go into smaller communities like Nanaimo where we don’t know if it will lead into full-time at this particular time. It’s unknown territory to us but we feel confident that the cities that we’re choosing are chosen with purpose.
“As far as expanding the pop up we’ll be looking throughout the rest of Canada and also we’ll be going back into the United States. Before COVID, we had one temporary store in Pasadena, California and there’s a benefit to having stores in the US, because our buying team travels down to California every three or four weeks.”
