I still remember the moment I called my old boss during our biggest crisis. We'd just lost our only employee, I was about to have our second child, and we were staring at our bank account, wondering if we should take a bet on opening our first store. "This may seem like the worst possible scenario right now," she told me, "but I promise you that this might end up being one of the best things that ever happened."
She was right. That gut punch moment forced us to go all-in on Province of Canada—something we'd been treating as a side hustle for years despite growing our $1,500 investment to respectable monthly revenue. Today, we're hitting months over $100,000, and we built the foundation for it all without spending a single dollar on ads in our first five years.
The romanticizing of entrepreneurship makes it seem like success happens overnight. The reality? It's five to seven years of blood, sweat and tears, working every single day even when no one's watching. But here's what I've learned: if you build a genuine community first, everything else—the sales, the growth, the retail expansion—becomes possible.
Starting with value, not sales
We shared a tweet every single day. We sent an email every single day. And it wasn’t about our products. Instead, we sent tidbits about Canada—fun facts about who invented Standard Time (a Canadian), interesting moments in our history that aren't always talked about. We got creative with ways to get in people's inbox on a daily basis without ever trying to sell them anything.
This approach of educating our customers rather than selling to our customers built something invaluable: trust. People signed up for our mailing list because they genuinely wanted to hear from us. They looked forward to learning something new about Canada each morning. By the time they’re ready to buy, we aren't strangers pushing products—we’re the brand that’s been showing up in their inbox with value for months or years.
The compound effect is incredible. Not only did we build a strong email list that we could control fully without relying on external platforms, but our consistent content creation strengthened our SEO and owned channels. We were relentless. We showed up every day. And slowly, organically, our community grew.
Making beautiful, unique content your competitive advantage
Jeremy still does all our campaign photography. I do the styling. After thousands and thousands of hours of creating content in-house, we've built something that most companies nowadays don't put effort into: a distinct visual voice.
We are such brand lovers and we are so passionate about telling these stories that we can't help ourselves. While other companies outsource or use stock imagery, we pour ourselves into every photo shoot. It's not just about saving money—though that helped in the early days. It's about controlling how our brand shows up in the world.
This obsession with visual storytelling became our differentiator. Our logo is literally the Canadian flag minus the maple leaf—we wanted to show that a Canadian brand doesn't need to look what is typically known as Canadian. We removed all those stereotypes and asked ourselves: How can this look different and be fresh for Canadians? Every piece of content we create reinforces this vision. We're not dripping in Canadiana. We're showing a different version of Canadian style—one that people actually want to wear every day.
Playing by industry rules won’t win the game
We didn't want a seasonal retail business. While wholesale was tempting for the exposure, we refused to play the seasonal fashion game where you discontinue products after six months.
Instead, we focused on creating products that could become part of someone's daily uniform. Almost everything we make is 100% cotton—simple, but increasingly hard to find nowadays. These are products I've had in my wardrobe for 20 years from other brands, and I wanted to bring that reliability to this generation.
I'm a uniform wearer myself. I love when a company has a shirt I love in ten colors, and I can go back and know exactly what I want. It's going to fit me the same, and I'm going to love it. That's the experience we provide: reliable basics in quality fabrics that customers can count on year after year.
This anti-fashion approach meant saying no to a lot of opportunities. But it also meant we could focus on perfecting our core products instead of constantly chasing trends. We roll over products, bring in new colors, tweak things here and there, but we don't waste energy on seasonal collections that force us to start from scratch every few months.
Reinvesting everything (and being patient)
We didn't take any money from the company for many, many years. Every dollar went back into inventory, which sat in our loft. We kept our day jobs as Shopify experts, building ecommerce sites for other brands while running Province of Canada as our side hustle.
The romanticizing of entrepreneurship doesn't show you this part—the years of grinding when you're not sure if you're kidding yourself. But we kept reinvesting. When we finally hit our first $100,000 month in 2019, we'd been at it for five years. That success didn't come from a viral moment or a lucky break. It came from five years of showing up every day, reinvesting every penny, and slowly building something sustainable.
Even when we opened our first retail shop in 2019, we went into debt more than we ever had. We were literally at the end of our bank account. But we knew if we never went all in, we'd never know if this was possible.
Knowing when to level up
Organic growth creates the foundation for everything else. Only after we'd proven our model and had a financial runway did we finally start paid advertising. Even then, we approached it with the same rigor we'd applied to organic growth.
We analyze campaign reports, not monthly. As soon as something's not working, we change it. We give ads a week and a half, then cut them if they're not performing. We don't waste money on ads that aren't working. It's easy to just throw money at advertising and let it go, but with tight margins from making everything in Canada, we have to be careful with every dollar.
Opening retail wasn't about starting over—it was about amplifying what we'd built online. Our online sales have grown in a huge way since opening physical stores. Our sales are literally like a radius around our stores. The community around them supports us so much, both in-store and online.
If we hadn't built that organic foundation first—the email list, the daily content, the community trust—none of the paid amplification would have worked. You can't buy your way to authentic connection. You have to earn it, one day at a time, one piece of value at a time.
Looking back, that crisis moment when I called my old boss really was one of the best things that ever happened. It forced us to choose: go all in or give up. We went all in, but we did it our way—organically, patiently, focused on providing value before asking for anything in return.
Recently, I got an email from a customer that simply said: "I just want to thank you so much for creating this brand and representing Canada." That's when I know all those years of showing up every day, all those Canadian facts, all that patient building—it was worth it. We're not just selling hoodies and t-shirts. We're building something for our community, for our country, and hopefully inspiring the next generation to do the same. Tune in to the full Shopify Masters episode for more organic growth tips.
