Wandering through Simons’s newest store a day before it opened on Thursday, Bernard Leblanc had a quiet confidence despite the busyness surrounding him.
Across almost every inch of the flagship store at Yorkdale mall in Toronto, staff were scurrying to unwrap and steam the last of the location’s merchandise, vacuum carpets and dress mannequins.
The seemingly menial tasks belied the enormity of what they were all preparing for: Simons’s entry into the venerable Toronto market.
That feat has been a long time coming. La Maison Simons is 185 years old but has taken such a methodical expansion outside its home province of Quebec that it only counted 17 stores until now. While it’s long wanted to head to Toronto, it somehow detoured through Halifax, Vancouver and even the city’s outskirts in nearby Mississauga before forging its way into the heart of Ontario on Thursday.
Leblanc, the CEO of Simons, sees the entry as both a “new chapter” for the company and proof that “slow and steady wins the race.”
“Ultimately, we have owners that don’t think in quarters. We think in generations,” he said of the Simons family.
They founded the business in Quebec City in 1840 as a dry goods retailer and charted its evolution into a department store beloved by Canadian fashionistas.
Leblanc is the first non-family member to hold the company’s top job and so there’s a lot riding on the Toronto expansion.
The retailer will spend a combined $75 million on the Yorkdale store and another to follow at the Eaton Centre this fall. Leblanc expects them to increase the company’s annual sales by 15 per cent to $650 million.
In some respects, his milestone is coming at a perfect time. The last eight months saw the fall of Simons’ biggest competitor — 355-year-old department store Hudson’s Bay — and a rise in consumer support for Canadian goods amid the tariff war. Simons’ house brands, including Twik, Icône, Contemporaine and Le 31, make up 70 per cent of its stores’ merchandise on average.
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While Leblanc is thrilled to see the patriotism having an effect on customers, he’s not relishing the collapse of his rival, which filed for creditor protection under the weight of mounting debt in March.
“I’m saddened by the fact that such a historical Canadian icon has left the market,” he said of Hudson’s Bay. “As a retailer, we like to have a very buoyant and dynamic retail industry, so having somebody exit is always a little bit of a shock to the industry.”
It was also a reminder to Simons that the company has to keep reinventing itself because “history and heritage is not a guarantee of success,” he said.
Simons has not publicly emerged as a bidder for any of the Bay leases or intellectual property.
Nor has it “aggressively pursued specific brands that we didn’t have because of exits from different people in the industry,” Leblanc said.
“We do scout the market globally for new upcoming brands and discover brands that people perhaps don’t know about,” he said. “That’s more our focus, not so much coming in to be opportunistic, to pick up something that somebody left behind.”
But it’s something that somebody left behind that helped make his company’s Toronto ambitions a reality.
Simons was only able to move into Yorkdale and Eaton Centre because U.S. department store Nordstrom decamped from Canada in 2023, saying it had been too hard to make a profit in the market.
The massive properties Nordstrom held in some of Toronto’s top shopping destinations presented the opportunity Simons had long been looking for.
“We had been in discussions with Yorkdale for some time,” Leblanc said. “We were here many years ago trying to see what potentially we could put together.”
At 118,000 square feet, the new, two-storey Yorkdale location will be the largest space in Simons’s Ontario portfolio. It carries many of the same brands shoppers have come to expect from other markets — Herschel, JW Anderson and Lacoste.
Unique to this location is a sprawling, geometric ceiling mural called “Ciel” from French artist Nelio that gives the store a fresh, airy feel. A “walk of frames” composed of 40 pieces from 24 artists brings another reason to linger in many of the store’s nooks.
Leblanc is betting the merchandise and store vibe will keep customers coming back and teach his company valuable lessons it can use as it continues to plot future growth.
He named both Toronto and Vancouver as markets that may be able to support even more Simons stores but said for now he’s focused on “taking it all in stride.”
“I’m really excited about making these two stores a success, starting with Yorkdale,” he said. “And then we’ll see where things take us.”
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