SISTERS MARK 50 YEARS OF DRESSING CALGARIANS, WEATHERING MANY STORMS
Suzanne Truba Ltd. has survived several recessions while bigger stores come and go
“You’re too young, you’re too inexperienced and you don’t have enough capital.”
As she recalls those words said to her as an aspiring store owner, Suzanne Truba can’t help but laugh.
“All three (warnings) were correct,” she says. “But I thought, ‘Oh, no, this is gonna work.’”
Truba can afford to laugh at the memory. After all, this year she is marking 50 years as the owner of Suzanne Truba Ltd., one of the country’s longest-running independent retailers boasting the same continuous owner.
In that half-century, she’s seen countless small retailers throw in the towel in this city, not to mention big ones such as Bretton’s, Woodwards, Target and, most recently, Sears. She has watched the trend toward online shopping topple many a Goliath, while her little David of a store keeps serving a loyal Calgary clientele.
On Thursday morning, Truba is where she is most days, greeting customers in her women’s clothing boutique at Dalhousie Station in the city’s northwest, her third location over the past half-century. At her side is her sister, Toni Thomas, who has been her partner in business for most of those years.
“We’re hands on, basically we are the store,” says Truba, who has two part-time employees, one of them her daughter Ashley. “People expect to see us there — we’re married to the place.”
Still, it’s a happy marriage, a true labour of love for the sisters who get along famously on and off the job.
“When we were younger, I said, ‘she does everything I tell her to do and it works out perfectly,’” Truba says with a laugh, as she and Thomas stand beside a large portrait of the two of them from the 1960s, when they were just starting out. “Now that we’re older, she tells me what to do and it works out perfectly.”
While the stylish entrepreneur can’t imagine having done anything else for a living, her early career aspirations would have had her spending her days in hospital garb rather than the casual separates she sells today.
Back in 1961, the native of Cardston moved to Calgary to study at the Holy Cross School of Nursing, later working at Foothills Hospital as a registered nurse.
On her breaks, she’d stop in at a women’s clothing boutique in Stadium Shopping Centre and chat with the owner. When that owner told her in the summer of 1968 that she was planning to open a store at Brentwood mall and wanted to hire her as its manager, Truba’s life took an unexpected turn.
“I jumped at the chance, because I really wasn’t a happy nurse,” says Truba, who was 25 at the time.
The boutique owner, though, changed her mind and decided not to open shop at Brentwood, the store’s first of three homes over the decades. That’s when Truba’s then-husband told her to strike out on her own.
The man in charge of leasing storefronts wasn’t impressed with her lack of credentials, but in time relented.
“He said, ‘If you can have it open for Nov. 1, you can have the spot. Toni and I did a driving trip to Toronto and bought cash-andcarry stock. On Nov. 1, we opened with empty racks,” she says with a laugh. “It was a joke.”
Within a year, Toni had signed on to help her elder sister run the store. The sibling team has kept at it over those five decades, surviving through several economic downturns.
Truba says the recession of the early 1980s was the most challenging.
“Interest rates were around 20 per cent,” says Truba, who by then had a second store in Kensington.
To keep afloat, she diversified into fashion consultation and public speaking.
Despite the ongoing challenges of running an independent clothing boutique in the age of the internet, Truba says neither she nor her sister have intentions of closing up shop any time soon.
“I’ve always liked being independent, working for myself,” she says, adding with a laugh, “that’s why I wasn’t a good nurse.”
Truba, a mother of two and grandmother of six, says she and Thomas feel blessed to have run their business their way.
“I give thanks every day,” she says of her love of both fashion and providing a service focused on relationships.
“Retire? I don’t know how to leave it,” she says. “People seek our knowledge, seek our opinion — and that’s a good feeling.” Thomas agrees.
“When you start something so young, it’s your baby.”