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Quebec City-based La Maison Simons will likely announce its first Vancouver-area store in the coming weeks. If the deal has been signed (the mall’s landlord won’t yet confirm), it would be located in the suburbs at a relatively upscale shopping centre.
We were holding off on breaking this news but The Globe & Mail has just reported that Peter Simons may make a Vancouver store announcement in the coming weeks. We’ll won’t mention which Vancouver-area mall may feature Simons, though those familiar with the region can probably narrow their guesses to one of three or four malls.
Simons is also looking to open one or more Calgary stores – one suburban and one possibly in the downtown core. Winnipeg is a possibility for Simons as well – Polo Park is our best guess but it could also go into a newly-built retail complex.
Currently, the only Simons store not in Quebec is at West Edmonton Mall. It’s the largest in the chain at 118,000 square feet, and we’ve been told that its sales are stellar.
La Maison Simons continues its expansion across Canada, and it’s in talks with mall landlords nation wide. We reported that Simons was in talks to open stores at Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre and Mississauga’s Square One, after Sears Canada sold its leases to those mall’s landlords. Simons has secured a lease for a 105,000 square foot store at Ottawa’s Rideau Centre (to open in 2016), and may open a second Ottawa-area store in Gatineau. Its ninth store opened last month at Montreal’s Les Galeries d’Anjou.
Simons’ combination of inexpensive, fashionable, private-label clothing and more expensive designer brands seems to be working. We think that as many as 10 new Simons stores will be open in Canada within the next five years.
[La Maison Simons website]
The only relatively upscale suburban mall suggested by the photograph above would be Park Royal.
I enjoy your report and its, mostly, accurate information, but I sincerely wish you would stop talking about retailers opening coast to coast, when you actually mean from Quebec to BC. Rarely do any of the retailers mentioned on here open in the Maritimes, and rarely is there any news on the site from this area. Halifax is the only major urban area, with a metro population of over 425,000 and a relatively stable and prosperous income level and very few of these retailers will ever think of opening around here.
Hello visualman57, if you've got retail-related news from the Maritimes, please send it our way! We have no 'insiders' from your area, hence the lack of reporting. insider@retail-insider.com is our email, and we'd love to report on East Coast retail.
Hello visualman57, if you've got retail-related news from the Maritimes, please send it our way! We have no 'insiders' from your area, hence the lack of reporting. insider@retail-insider.com is our email, and we'd love to report on East Coast retail.