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It all started
May first 1995 and that was the day that I opened this store
on Queen Street West in Toronto
people used to ask me, cause I used to do this to my own clothes I used to
buy vintage clothing but it always needed to be slightly updated
maybe a button needed to be changed or maybe the length of a dress needed to be
changed
so I used to do that to my own clothes people would ask me all of the time where'd you get that where'd you get that
so I thought I think if people would actually buy this stuff
so opened a little store on Queen Street West
it was I'd say ninety-eight percent vintage clothing and then
you know a few odd pieces of something that's been altered slightly
and then it just started to evolve I think the biggest turn was
meeting Peter Friesen who is my head designer and creative director today
he came into the store I think about third day I had opened he was a student at
Ryerson
in design and he asked if he could do a co-op and I didn't know what a co-op meant
and then when he told me was gonna come and work for free like start
right now and he's never left, when I think of how we used to make the clothes to what I do now
it still makes me laugh
originally Peter would have been the only cut and sew
guy out there he would you know he'd make a sweater and I'd say oh my god I
love it
I want to make it again and he wouldn't know how to make it again so we started
figuring out different ways to make pictures of what he'd done, make patterns
of what he had done
and then once we had that I said you know what we could have somebody
or with you and so we started hiring different student
mainly student and they would do the cutting process and then we would look
at local sewers
to put that the pieces together
now we recycle over a hundred thousand sweaters a season, in the design phase
we will decide what colors will work well together
so we will decide that the blues and the browns are really in this season
and then there are certain sweaters styles that could use patterns
certain ones that can't I always say we're always doing the
oxymoron, I'm mass-producing a one-of-a-kind we have to make sure the
product does look
somewhat mass you know when a big store like Anthropology will order four thousand
sweaters
of mine they kinda have to look similar somewhere or it's hard to merchandise in a
big store
Preloved is a wonderful thing because it hits
a lot of you know buzz words that big companies are looking for right now
sustainable, made in Canada, these big words that
large companies are trying to keep up with and trying to figure out how they
do it so they sometimes have to come to the small fries
and I could teach them, you know how to keep your manufacturing local
and how we can use vintage product to recycle it
we ought to look out for what we're doing because we are making an impact
on the planet and it's very important that we're aware of everything we're doing
so now we do an eco-friendly dry cleaning process now
uses much less water things like that I always say I'm the accidental
environmentalist it just all sort of happened I just set out to make pretty clothes
so now we're making a statement, something we're very, very proud of