Vancouver-based furniture store Sundays is expanding and opening a showroom in Calgary this year.
It will be the brand’s third Canadian showroom. The company has locations in place in Vancouver near South Granville on West 6th Avenue and in Toronto on Ossington Avenue.
Sundays will bring its thoughtfully designed furniture to customers in Calgary in its very own showroom – giving existing and new customers alike the chance to see and feel its collection in person. The store will be located at The District at Beltline development in downtown Calgary with neighbours including 33 Acres, Central and DeVille Coffee.
The Calgary store will be the brand’s largest at 4,000 square feet. The Toronto store is 2,188 square feet while the Vancouver store is 1,865 square feet.
“We have had a partnership with Socality House on 17th (Avenue SW) which featured a few of our pieces and over the last year, year and a half, we have continued to observe increased e-comm sales in Calgary and Alberta,” said Barbora Samieian, Co-Founder, Director of Brand and Community for Sundays.
“Calgary is our third biggest sales driver in Canada behind BC and Ontario. And we’re really starting to see our customers resonate with the brand and what we observed in both Vancouver and Toronto with the showrooms is having those physical locations where customers and also trade partners can touch and feel the product, see the quality of our pieces in real life just really helps drive sales and build trust with the brand.
“We’re still a fairly new brand. We’ve only been around since late 2019. It just seemed like a great next market to put a physical showroom.”
Sundays Calgary is being built by CREATE and Way of Normal (the newly branded commercial arm of Fort Architecture).
The retailer launched in November 2019.
In a previous Retail Insider story, Samieian said: “An interesting time to launch a new business. The model was just to be a direct to consumer model with everything in stock. That was sort of our motto. We’ll stock a very curated selection of items and in November of 2019 we started with living room only – some sofas, coffee tables and a few end tables.
“Eventually we started expanding our living room collection and then we got into dining and bedroom as well but still a very tight and focused line. We started with just ecommerce but during COVID there were all of these empty spaces because restaurants were leaving and other businesses were shutting. So we actually started a little pop-up – a showroom – in Vancouver in about May or June of 2020 and we saw from that kind of experiment – it was like a two to three month lease – there was a lot of interest for customers to be able to touch and feel our furniture. So we’ve since opened a permanent showroom in Vancouver. That opened in the fall of 2021 on West 6th Avenue, South Granville, just off of the main furniture row in Vancouver.”
Samieian said Socality, a coffee shop and community gathering place in Calgary will continue to have some of Sundays furniture to experience the brand in real life.
“We will no longer be driving customers to Socality House but rather invite them to our showroom. Having said that, the partnership with Socality House has been really great. I think we’re very aligned – community minded businesses. We’ll still continue to partner on the creative side. They’re very plugged into the content creator community in Calgary. So we’re already planning some potential activations that we can do in the showroom once we open.”
The showroom in Calgary is expected to open in mid-April.
“We don’t have anything hard, penciled in for the remainder of 2023,” said Samieian. “However, we are going to be watching the response to this Calgary showroom closely and how it does and how it spills over to our e-comm sales. And how the retail store performs on its own and that sort of halo effect into our e-com sales in Calgary and I think based on that analysis if we continue to see the kind of trends that we’ve seen in Toronto and Vancouver, I think come late summer we might start looking for a fourth Canadian location.”
John Moss, Senior VP at CBRE, is the leasing contact for The District at Beltline.
