Family-owned furniture retailer Tepperman’s, in business since 1925, has opened its seventh location with the latest in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Andrew Tepperman, grandson of the founder and current company president, said the goal of the new store is to create a fresh, inspirational look for the brand.
“We included features like selfie stations, waterfall, kids area with digital games imported from England, courtesy popcorn and coffee café, electric car charger, nature rest area with live plants, solar panels to reduce energy costs, 1928 working pickup truck similar to what our founder Nate would have used and we filled it with old appliances and furniture from that era,” said Tepperman.
“We didn’t originally have it on our radar. We had opened up in Ancaster about an hour away near Hamilton in 2019 and we noticed over the last couple of years that we’re drawing people from St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. So it was actually challenging logistically to deliver all the way out there. So we started to do demographic research. We used Environics and we found out that the demographics was very similar for our top performing markets like Windsor for instance.
“So immediately we said we’ve got to start to dig into this place. There happened to be a large vacant site that was owned by Smart Centres. It was an old Home Outfitters and an old Designer Depot. The site had been sectioned off. We said we wanted to take the whole thing. It’s 66,000 square feet – 44,000 square feet is showroom and 19,000 square feet is warehousing.”
Tepperman said because this store is so far away from its main distribution centre in London the retailer needed a site with a larger warehouse capacity so it could deliver right from the store.
“We did a soft opening May 3 which was interesting because it’s really taken off,” he said. “It’s exceeding expectations. It’s a good market and I think it’s resonating because that market has not seen something new and fresh in a long time.
“We have kids and you’re not supposed to say one of them’s the nicest or the best but this our best looking store. We put a lot into it. What was interesting was starting about five years ago we began renovating all of our stores and before we even looked at St. Catharines we developed this Tepperman’s 2.0 model and Ancaster would have been a 2.0 model. The last store was London but London was so big we said let’s develop a Tepperman’s 3.0 model, make it more interesting, more inspirational, more experiential.
“We engaged our designer who is from New York and we said kind of surprise us. Come up with something new. So she developed this amazing new look for London but construction costs have gone up a lot. So we said we have to put London on hold with this new design but all of sudden we realized we have St. Catharines now coming on line. The timing was perfect. We pulled some of the best new ideas from the Tepperman’s 3.0 model and put it into St. Catharines.”
Don Gregor of Aurura Realty Consultants is the real estate representive for Tepperman’s.
Tepperman said the retailer is not targeting anything right now for expansion.
“It’s kind of wait and see. We’re always looking. Any opportunity that comes by we look at but we don’t have like a specific target market today,” he said.
Tepperman’s started as a dream when Nate Tepperman began his peddling career selling door-to-door in Windsor, Ontario in 1925.
In a previous story with Retail Insider, Andrew Tepperman said his grandfather left Russia right after the Revolution in that country and came to Canada.
“I think he had a Grade Five education. English was not his first language. No money. I think he worked at odd jobs. We don’t know a lot and then in 1925 he started going door to door selling rugs and blankets,” said Tepperman.
“This is really interesting. He needed to differentiate what he was doing. So he would sell it on credit and every week he would go back and collect a nickel and what’s amazing fast forward to today we use that exact same model and we still do in-house credit where everyone else uses banks. We follow the exact same thing he did from 1925. So, when times get tough, we work very closely in a different way with our customers and that’s always been a differentiator for us.”
Tepperman said his grandfather eventually got a bicycle so he didn’t have to walk door to door and then got a pickup truck and eventually opened his first brick and mortar store – all within the same area in Windsor.
“He never expanded. He went from 1925 to 1970 one store, one location in Windsor. And he unfortunately drowned in 1970 when he was 70 years old. He was on vacation in Florida. So my father Bill Tepperman was 36 at the time and was kind of thrust into the leadership position of the business and my father continued to build up on the legacy and then in 1983 he expanded to Chatham and then 1992 expanded to Sarnia and in 1997 expanded to London,” he said.
“In 2006, my father retired, and I took over as president and my brother took over as secretary-treasurer. We had four stores at the time, and we continued to grow the stores. We outgrew London so we closed the store that we had been in for 10 years and in 2008 we built a very large facility in London just down the street and today it’s our largest store. It’s 85,000 square feet of showroom and 150,000 square feet of distribution space. It’s pretty large. It’s joined together.”
