I was reading a report that Lego was going to open their first Canadian store in the Chinook Centre in Calgary. There are 53 of them around the world. I remember being in a Lego store, with some large Lego displays in St. Jacobs, Ontario just outside of Guelph at the Outlet Mall. But I guess it was just a retailer of the product or maybe the company was using the outlet to get out of date stock sold.
I also didn’t realize that there were special people employed by Lego to make these big models that are designed by specialists professionals if you will, that do this for a living. We have one of those designers living in Abbotsford and he said the new store in Calgary is exciting and the people are going to love it. The store opens in July. Why Calgary? The fact of the matter is that of their 2.1 million readers of the Lego Club magazine, Calgary is well represented.
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The Osoyoos Celebrity Wine Festival wrapped up June 12th with a sold out charity auction dinner at Spirit Ridge. Jason Priestley and Terry David Mulligan were auctioneers at the dinner and Steven Page, formerly of the Barenaked Ladies, earned a standing ovation for his performance.
The 2nd Annual Osoyoos Celebrity Wine Festival featured “The Vinos”, the World's First Wine Commercial Film Festival, a Celebrity VIP Reception and Beach Party at the Walnut Beach Hotel, the Nota Bene release party at Black Hills Winery, the Charity Auction and Judgment in Osoyoos, a blind taste test held at the Watermark Beach Resort.
“This year’s festival hit a completely new high. We were able to leverage the credibility we established at last year's festival to create a more broadly encompassing festival that had a significant economic impact for the Osoyoos business community,” says Osoyoos Celebrity Wine Festival co-founder, Glenn Fawcett, “It was an exceptional collaboration of effort and time from 17 wineries, 4 hotels, 8 chefs, 10 celebrities, 3 musical performance (Steven Page, Bruce Greenwood, Double Magnum), and 29 film producers for 'the Vinos'.”
Participating wineries included: Thornhaven, Aces, Desert Hills, Painted Rock, Dunham & Froese, Iniskillin, Young & Wyse, See Ya Later Ranch, NK' Mip, Sumac Ridge, Quinta Ferreira, Prospect Winery, Jackson Triggs, Osoyoos Larose, Golden Beaver, Le Vieux Pin, and Burrowing Owl.
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If you shop at an Ikea store you’ll be there for at least two hours and you will buy something, maybe just a pillow. It is a lesson in marketing most have been unable to copy, as I have written about many times in the last twenty years. I never thought I would be writing this item but this is a good one and from a very good source.
An Ikea store in West Kelowna, so my source tells me. I have great difficulty in imagining that this is in the plan for the Swedish retailer. I know their next store is Winnipeg, although they do have plans to increase their store space in Canada by thirty per cent. But these new Ikea stores have a footprint of over three hundred thousand square feet. That is a large retail space. We have also heard of a rebuild of the store in Richmond.
First of all, land is expensive in this valley and we don’t have the people the merchant needs to operate such a monster. Even when you include the entire Interior of B.C.
We will have to wait and see. I can remember when we saw the first of the Ikea stores in the west in Edmonton and they were about 140,000 square feet and that is probably twenty-five years ago or more.
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Meanwhile another international retailer is looking carefully at expanding the Canadian market for their brand, Lowes. The company already has fifteen Canadian locations in Ontario and is checking locations across the west for expansion. These locations need about ten to fifteen acres for the store, lumber yard, parking and garden centres. Again that is a lot of land at these prices.
Their first stores in the west will be in Edmonton and Calgary. The company has purchased land in Regina for a 103,000 sq.ft. home improvement store in Regina.
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