Montreal-based M0851 still believes in downtown
BRICKS-AND-MORTAR SHOPPING BRINGS VITAL HUMAN CONTACT, SAYS RETAILER
You don’t need to tell Faye Mamarbachi that the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the retail sector. She knows all about that. Mamarbachi is president of Montreal- based M0851, a company that designs and manufacturers leather bags, jackets, and accessories, and also has a number of stores, including its first one, on St- Laurent Blvd., just north of the downtown core. There has also been an M0851 store in the Eaton Centre/ Les Ailes de le Mode complex in downtown for close to 20 years. The company was founded by her father Frédéric Mamarbachi in 1987 and she has worked for the firm since she was 21.
The store actually temporarily moved out of the downtown shopping mall during the complex’s $ 200- million renovation project, setting up temporary residence nearby on Ste- Catherine St. W. It returned to the Eaton Centre in mid-march, but had to almost immediately shut down when the provincial government instituted the first lockdown. It actually opened the day Premier François Legault announced that all non- essential stores would have to close.
“Yes we had a bit of bad luck there,” said Mamarbachi.
It was open for literally one day! “Count that as 10 hours,” said Mamarbachi.
“It’s a brutal thing and it continues to be a brutal thing because it’s retail. The closing of that store and other stores was very scary for our company. But you just keep at it with your head held high.”
In the spring, they laid off their entire staff, about 40 people. Then everyone was rehired, in part thanks to various government aid programs.
M0851 also has stores at the Rockland Centre and in Laval, north of the island. There’s also one in Toronto. In addition, there’s a franchise store in Beijing and there are four franchises in Japan. Everything in each store is designed and produced by M0851. Sixty per cent of the stores’ merchandise is manufactured in Montreal, with the rest produced overseas. The company is well known for its leather jackets. Other products include scarves, bags and accessories.
The stores in Quebec reopened with everyone else in late June (before closing down again on Christmas Day for the “holiday pause”), but it’s a challenging environment.
“Downtown is hard,” Mamarbachi said. “That’s the reality for now but we’ll come through it. The reality of the pandemic is making it hard for us to reach the full potential of our downtown store. Before you had this wonderful surge of tourists and business people around the area, which was fantastic, and now downtown Montreal isn’t what it was pre-pandemic.
MAYBE NOT TO THE SAME SCALE AND MAYBE NOT TOMORROW, BUT THINGS WILL COME BACK.
But we have confidence that it’ll come back to its regular state but not for now. ...
“Downtown has evolved over the past three decades,” Mamarbachi added.
“I remember when I was kid, the only place to go was downtown. Neighbourhoods have developed and now downtown is not necessarily the first go-to. Right now we’re just laying low, waiting for the dust to settle, waiting to get on the other side of this pandemic and things will have changed. But people will have to go to offices and want to go out to lunch. Maybe not to the same scale and maybe not tomorrow, but things will come back. We need human contact.”
They had already been developing an ecommerce business and that has grown this year, like most other online sales businesses. That helped keep their finances in decent shape.
“We were lucky enough to have an online platform that already existed and was already part of our revenue,”
WE WERE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE AN ONLINE PLATFORM THAT ALREADY EXISTED.
Mamarbachi said.
“The impact of the pandemic was huge, but we were able to adapt quickly.”
At the height of the first lockdown, Mamarbachi would go in by herself to the head office/manufacturing centre in the Chabanel district and she’d be putting together packages herself for the ecommerce business.
Their online business is up 75 per cent compared with a year earlier. Online is booming, but Mamarbachi still believes in real- life retail.
“I don’t think brick- andmortar ( retail) is gone,” Mamarbachi said. “I think it will change and evolve. We’re not letting go of brickand- mortar. There’s something to be said to having contact with other humans when you go out and shop. The scale will not be the same obviously. ecommerce is going to take a huge part of the revenues. That’s certain.”
The silver lining for Mamarbachi, like for so many others, was spending time with her family. She and her common- law- husband have twin eight- yearold boys.
“We grew stronger as a family,” said Mamarbachi. “But it’s difficult as a parent when you don’t know what lies ahead. They keep asking what’s going to happen next and you have to answer without a clear answer yourself. But giving them confidence and assurance that the next day is going to be a good day.
And they watch the news with you and I think it’s an important part of their development, to be informed.”