Simons opens his 1st Toronto store in Yorkdale Mall

Bernard Leblanc wandered through the newest store in Simons a day before it was opened on Thursday, despite the crowds around him.

Almost every centimeter of the flagship store in Yorkdale Mall in Toronto, the staff ran to unpack and steam the latest merchandise, vacuum carpets and mannequins.

The apparently subordinate tasks left the enormous size of what they all prepared: Simons’ access to the venerable Toronto market.

That achievement has long come. La Maison Simons is 185 years old, but has taken such a methodical expansion outside of his home province Quebec that it has only had 17 stores so far.

Although it wanted to go to Toronto for a long time, it somehow went through Halifax, West Vancouver and even the edge of the city in nearby Mississauga, before he forged his way to the heart of Ontario on Thursday.

‘A new chapter’ for Simons

Leblanc, the CEO of Simons, sees the entry and both a “new chapter” for the company and proof that “slow and stable wins the race”.

“In the end we have owners who don’t think in quarters. We think in generations,” he said about the Simons family.

They founded the company in Quebec City in 1840 as a dry goods shop and brought his evolution to a department store loved by Canadian fashionistas.

Leblanc is the first non-family member to hold the best job of the company and so there is a lot on the expansion of Toronto.

The retailer will spend a combined $ 75 million on the Yorkdale store and another to follow in the Eaton Center this fall. Leblanc expects them to increase the annual turnover of the company by 15 percent to $ 650 million.

In some respects his milestone comes at a perfect moment. In the past eight months, the fall of the biggest competitor of Simons-De 355-year-old department store Hudson’s Bay and an increase in consumer support for Canadian goods in the midst of the tariff war. Simons House brands, including Twik, Icone, Contemporaine and Le 31, form on average 70 percent of the merchandise of the stores.

Although Leblanc is delighted to see that patriotism has an effect on customers, he does not enjoy the collapse of his rival.

“I am sad that such a historic Canadian icon has left the market,” he said about Hudson’s Bay. “As a retailer we like a very floating and dynamic retail trade, so it’s always a bit of a shock for the industry.”

History, heritage does not guarantee success

It was also a memory of Simons that the company had to keep inventing itself because “history and heritage is not a guarantee of success,” he said.

Simons has not publicly emerged as a bidder for one of the bay rental contracts or intellectual property.

Neither has the “aggressive specific brands we did not have because of the outputs of different people in the industry,” said Leblanc.

“We explore the market worldwide for new upcoming brands and discover brands that people may not know,” he said. “That is more our focus, not so much coming in to be opportunistic, to pick up something that someone has left behind.”

But it is something that someone has left that contributed to the Toronto ambitions of his company.

Simons was only able to move to Yorkdale and Eaton Center because the American department store Nordstrom was decamped in 2023 from Canada and said it would have been too difficult to make a profit in the market.

The enormous features that Nordstrom had held in some of the best store destinations in Toronto offered the opportunity that Simons had been looking for a long time.

“We had been in discussion with Yorkdale for some time,” said Leblanc. “We were here many years ago to see what we could possibly put together.”

On 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 that shoppers expect from other markets – Herschel, JW Anderson and Lacoste.

Unique for this location is a vast, geometric wall painting Ciel From the French artist Nelio who gives the store a fresh, light feeling. A “walk of frames” consisting of 40 pieces by 24 artists brings another reason to linger in many of the corners of the store.

Leblanc gambles on the merchandise and shopping vibe keeps customers back and gives his company valuable lessons that it can use while it continues to expand future growth.

He mentioned both Toronto and Vancouver as markets that may support even more Simons stores, but said that he has focused on ‘troubling it all’ for now.

“I am really enthusiastic about making these two stores a success, starting with Yorkdale,” he said. “And then we will see where things bring us.”