Less than a year after opening its flagship Vancouver showroom direct-to-consumer furniture retailer CouchHaus has launched its first-ever pop-up store in Toronto.
Harrison Gordon and Paige Sandher, Co-Founders, were a couple in the search for a perfect couch a few years ago which led to the creation of CouchHaus.
“Toronto piqued our interest. We knew we had a lot of data behind people wanting to purchase in Toronto and we have and do ship across Canada already but we knew it’s a big purchasing decision for a lot of our clients and they want to touch and feel our products beforehand. That’s where it was a logical step for us to open our pop-up in Toronto,” said Sandher.
The pop-up opened November 1 at the Stackt Market on Bathurst St. in about 700 square feet, which is about half the size of the Vancouver showroom.
“We’ll be there for three months for sure. There’s options to extend. The way Stackt Market works is a pop-up location so they really give you flexibility for small businesses to see what’s a good fit. If it’s something we’re interested in, we might be somewhere permanent in Toronto as well,” added Sandher.
She said the location is great for the brand because of the strong foot traffic. There are also various activations there that encourage community to come together. The brand itself is also having different experiences at the location for the holiday season.
“I would say it’s a really communal space rather than just a shopping area to be in,” added Sandher.
“There’s 600,000 people in Vancouver and 2.6 million in Toronto. It’s a large city and there’s so much more development as well. All around there’s new construction, there’s new buildings going up. We’re having so many people walk by that are just around the corner and then other people that will drive an hour and a half to come see us.”
The positive experience bodes well for a future showroom in Toronto.
“Eventually I think it’s definitely on our radar,” explained Sandher.
“Ultimately it’s finding the right space and making sure that it something that feels like an experience for our clients rather than just a store that you walk into because we are offering quite unique approach to customizing your couch.”
And perhaps even beyond Toronto.
“I think Calgary is next on our radar,” she said.
The flagship Vancouver store is at Granville and Broadway.
The company was founded March 2021.
“It’s been absolutely amazing. We’ve been able to scale to a team. We’ve grown as well as a business. It’s been good. It’s obviously come with its challenges, just learning how to do all that as co-founders team of two to now growing and scaling to other people,” said Sandher.
Specializing in customization
In a previous story in Retail Insider, co-founder Gordon said:
“CouchHaus is a direct-to-consumer furniture company, so we specialize in modular furniture and our main focus is on customization. We can offer hundreds of different fabrics and also made to measure. If you have a certain space that only allows for a certain size, maybe it’s only 110 inches, we can tailor it to your space and custom make it there. And a lot of companies usually charge an arm and a leg to upgrade whereas we offer all these changes for free.”
“We were just looking for furniture for ourselves. We’re not only co-founders, but we’re also partners. We were moving into a new home and Harrison’s quite tall and I’m quite short. We’ve got a six-four and a five-two over here. He wanted a deeper seating couch but a lot of the deeper seats weren’t fitting into our townhome,” said Sandher.
“We didn’t have like the length of a full detached home that traditionally deeper couches are made for . . . When we looked at all the custom options after purchasing our first home we realized that custom furniture can go up to like $10,000 to $15,000 and we just weren’t in a space that we were able to spend that much. We thought, how could we do this in a more cost effective manner?”
Gordon said it was a running joke that they started selling a couch out of their house.
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