canadian-retail
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Angelina Yagudayev Built a Canadian Apparel Business. Now She Is Matching Stories With Shelves Worldwide
Her career is a study in commercial range: start with one market, learn every handoff, then turn brand recognition into something a retailer can actually sell.
Angela MacInnis Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Things Feel Simple
From youth marketing at DDB to a national retail reset at Best Buy Canada and a new chapter at KITS, Angela MacInnis has built her career around one deceptively hard brief: make the customer experience easier to understand and better to use.
Mari Loewen Built a Food Brand Around the Small Rituals That Make a Life
She turned a kitchen-table magazine into an education in publishing, digital reinvention and retail - then brought the same editorial instinct to the grocery aisle.
Mary MacIsaac Moves at the Speed of the Shopping Cart
Inside Loblaw's marketing machine, Mary MacIsaac turns cupboard curiosity, live customer signals and local store voices into brands built for everyday Canadian life.
Ashish Khera’s Retail Playbook: Let the Store Do the Talking
At Healthy Planet, Ashish Khera is treating each new store as a local experiment - one where format, education and trust matter as much as the marketing campaign.
Cindy-Lynn Steele Knows the Store Is a System
From software engineering to Grocery Gateway, Giant Tiger and fractional leadership, Cindy-Lynn Steele has spent more than 25 years treating marketing as an operating system - one that must connect the customer, the store and the numbers.
Tanbir Grover Built the Digital Aisle Without Abandoning the Store
Across Sears, Hudson’s Bay, Lowe’s Canada and Pet Valu, Tanbir Grover learned that digital retail works best when the people running the stores can see themselves in the plan.
What Retailers Can Steal From Tepperman’s 100-Year Trust Machine
A Windsor peddler’s shop became a seven-store Ontario institution by treating credit, delivery and community memory as part of the product. Its centennial offers a useful playbook - and a warning - for every regional retailer fighting national chains and endless online aisles.
John Fluevog Nearly Ran Out of Money - Then Made Weirdness Its Moat
The Vancouver shoemaker survived two brushes with collapse, stopped trying to please the middle, and built a durable cult around shoes that announce themselves before their wearer does.
SVP Sports Built a 40-Year Retail Business on One Unfashionable Skill: Buying What Other Stores Miss
The Toronto retailer does not manufacture the sneaker or own the team logo. It wins in the less glamorous middle - spotting supplier deals, buying volume and turning leftover uncertainty into a reason to come back.
M&M Food Market Was Frozen in the ’90s - Then It Let Shoppers Open the Freezer
The Canadian frozen-food chain had a tired name, blank white boxes and a counter customers found intimidating. Its comeback began with a wonderfully literal idea: let people browse.
How Pet Valu Turned a $100 Million Warehouse Bet Into an 877-Store Playbook for Neighborhood Retailers
Pet Valu sells the recurring essentials pets cannot postpone, but its real product is local trust at national scale. A four-year logistics overhaul shows how the 50-year-old Canadian chain is trying to make that contradiction pay.
Loblaw Built a Retail Flywheel From Bananas, Bandages and 18 Million Loyalty Cards
The Canadian retailer turned self-service groceries into a century-long habit, then layered on private labels, pharmacies, apps and points. The result is a formidable convenience machine - and a permanent invitation to scrutinize the price of dinner.
The $43 Million Shortcut: How KITS Turned Contact Lenses Into a Million-Customer Eyewear Machine
KITS bought a working contact-lens engine, gave away the first pair of glasses, and spent years teaching a low-margin retailer to manufacture loyalty. The useful lesson is not the discount - it is the machinery behind it.
How Source for Sports Made Local Ownership Its National Advantage
The Canadian sporting-goods network found a middle lane between the big-box chain and the lonely independent: pool the buying power, share the technology, and let local owners keep the whistle.
Jason Potter
Jason Potter is the President and CEO of Grocery Outlet, the Emeryville-based bargain grocery chain known for its independent owner-operator model and treasure-hunt aisles. He took the top job on February 3, 2025, after nearly five years steering The Fresh Market and 26 years climbing through Sobeys, Canada's national grocery giant. He started bagging groceries at 13 in a small Alberta town and has been in the trade ever since.