While living in Peru, Bojana Sentaler discovered the beautiful alpaca fibre and fell in love with its lightweight and warm features.
From that experience, in 2009 she launched the luxury outerwear brand, SENTALER.
Recently, the brand opened a flagship store in Yorkville Village in Toronto and expanded into menswear with international growth plans for the future.
Many well-known celebrities such as Megan Markle, Kate Middleton and Halle Berry have been seen wearing the brand.
Sentaler graduated from the Schulich School of Business with a degree in Marketing and Finance and initially worked in the corporate world after university where she found out that her entrepreneurial spirit was constrained by the corporate structure.
“I ended up leaving my job and leaving Canada and in 2008 I moved to Dubai to explore new opportunities and while I was living in Dubai I was working in media. So I was putting together economic investment reports on emerging markets with a specialization in the Middle East North Africa region and at the time Karl Lagerfield was designing villas in Dubai. I had the pleasure of interviewing him for one of the reports we were working on and it was quite an interesting interview for me because I have very high respect for him and he was somebody I really looked up to as a fashion genius,” said Sentaler, who was born in Belgrade and moved to Toronto at the age of eight.
It was that meeting that sparked her journey into the world of fashion. It was her first source of inspiration in launching her own collection one day. At the end of 2008, the global economic downturn took place. She returned to Canada.
“I remember it was winter. It was December. It was cold. I think I was very used to living in a warm climate for a year while I was living in Dubai. So I picked up my bags and I travelled to South America at the beginning of 2009 and I ended up staying and living in Lima, Peru for six months while I was there. While I was living in Lima it was actually quite interesting. I always think everything happens for a reason,” said Sentaler. “I was working on a media project and I was meeting with everybody while I was there.
“It was interesting because at all the meetings Peruvians showed me their pride in their fabric which is alpaca and this is something that is part of their culture. They’re very proud of the alpaca animals in the Andes mountains as well as the product that comes from shearing the alpaca animals. After studying this fabric, I really fell in love with its features and its attributes which at the time I found quite intriguing considering I come from Canada where winters are very long and cold. So the fabric is extremely warm. It’s extremely lightweight. It’s very soft to the touch. It’s extremely high quality and it’s hypoallergenic and it’s sourced ethically. The animals are sacred animals in Peru . . . They’re protected and cared for.”
From there, she decided to make a collection of alpaca coats and launched SENTALER in 2009. She made her first collection of seven coats that included every coat she ever dreamed of owning. She moved back to Toronto to launch the brand.
“The very first collection was available in Toronto only and it was by order. This is when I built my network of clients in Toronto and throughout the years we launched sentaler.com a few years later and that’s when we made the collection available online internationally,” said Sentaler.
In 2010, she opened up the first SENTALER showroom at 555 Richmond Street West in Toronto. The collections were available to customers at the showroom exclusively and this was the company’s first location. It then developed a retail partnership with Holt Renfrew – its first retail partner, which was followed by Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Andrews and many other independent retail boutiques.
The Yorkville location was opened in the fall and its first flagship retail store outside of the showroom she has operated since 2010.
“The women’s collection has been doing extremely well since its launch and throughout the years we have had an enormous demand for men’s coats. Also our women clients were always interested in coats for their husbands and their significant others and in general we’ve seen a very large demand for men’s coats. So I decided two years ago to launch a men’s collection and I made this announcement at SENTALER’S 10th anniversary party which took place at the EY Tower on top of the 40th floor in 2019,” she said.
“I’ve been working on the men’s collection since and I finally launched the first ever SENTALER men’s collection in October.”
Sentaler said the retailer has developed as a home-grown brand in Canada as well as internationally.
“The plan really for SENTALER is to continue to grow internationally. We definitely want to reach our clients in all the major fashion cities in the world and then just to continue to also expand our product offering,” she said.
