Canadian retailer Simons is expanding. Can it succeed where its peers

Standing between the racks at a Simons store in Mississauga, Ont., Luke Gillet was on a mission to buy his dream wedding suit. 

“They have a crazy colour that I want to wear,” Gillet explained. “There’s a pink suit here that I was really hoping to find and it matches my fiancée’s dress, which has sort of a blush pink.”

Gillet is happy to support a Canadian-owned business, but that’s only one part of the retailer’s appeal, he said: “The selection is great. The fashions are current, the prices are really good.”

The Canadian fashion and homeware retailer is betting on happy customers like Gillet as it continues its gradual expansion. With a 10-store presence in Quebec, and a handful of others sprinkled between Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Halifax, the brand is opening two locations in Toronto this year at Yorkdale Shopping Mall and the Eaton Centre — in addition to its Mississauga and Ottawa stores.

Yet, as the company relocates to a space haunted by the ghosts of big retailers past — Nordstrom, Eatons and Sears are all former tenants of the Eaton Centre space — it’s a stark reminder that department stores have struggled to gain a foothold in the Canadian market.

The aforementioned brands (and Target) have each met their demise in this country over the last two decades, some because of the challenges posed by transplanting a U.S. business into Canada.

Even as rising costs, picky customers and online competition roil an unpredictable retail industry, Simons says it’s doing things differently. Can it beat the big retail curse?

‘The reality is we have to stay competitive’

“I would not say that … because other department stores have failed in those places, that necessarily means that Simons is going to fail,” said Joseph Aversa, a retail management assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“Simons went through a lot of challenges, right? In 2022, they experienced a fair bit of difficulty,” he noted. The retailer was family-run until that year, when it appointed its first outside CEO in Bernard Leblanc to steer the company out of the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, the company has been “very calculated in terms of their expansions,” Aversa said. “They’ve grown relatively organically across across the country.”

Simons has seen steady growth in the last few years coming out of the pandemic, CEO Leblanc told CBC News in an interview, seeing a three per cent bump in sales growth from 2022 to 2023.

But the executive is well aware of the challenges that its forebears experienced in the Canadian market. The retailers that succeed in a market plagued by failure are the ones…