The Pristine Life: Meet Saint John’s Harrison Teed
SAINT JOHN – Harrison Teed first stepped on a snowboard at age 10.
It was only a matter of time before you’d find him hanging around Saint John’s local skate shops, participating in competitions they sponsored.
“I ended up becoming friends with a lot of the owners and when I was 16. I thought ‘man, that would be awesome job,'” Teed says.
Today Teed is the owner of Pristine, a skateboard, accessory and urban lifestyle fashion boutique in uptown Saint John. Though Pristine first opened in August 2013, Teed’s entrepreneurial adventure started three years earlier.
After saving enough money from working at a call centre and odd jobs, in 2010 Teed and his friend Josh Palmer founded the Artificial Project, a wholesale skateboard company that created custom boards and clothing.
“I started my first [board] with spray painting it, and it ended up in 15 or 16 stores in Canada,” Teed says. “That was pretty cool.”
Soon, Teed was selling boards and clothing to shops across Atlantic Canada, such as Ballistic in St. John’s and Pro Skates in Halifax. It was fun, but the constant travelling to make the company work became a little too excessive.
“The skateboard was more like a hobby thing as it started out, and it was a super hard grind in our area as well,” Teed says.
Teed realized that when it came to shopping for clothing and lifestyle items, he wasn’t shopping locally. He saw an opportunity.
“Every time I wanted to go shopping I’d find myself on the Internet or do all the shopping while I was away,” he says. “I was in all of these other cool stores trying to push my own brand.”
A lot of these shops took the boutique experience to the next level, but were still designing some of their own clothing and boards as well. It was a model that wasn’t found in Saint John.
Teed closed Artificial, and opened Pristine. It was the best of both worlds.
“I kept all the aspects, without the travel basically,” Teed says.
Pristine first opened on Saint John’s gritty Prince Edward Street, off the beaten path from the other trendy shops in the uptown area. Though the neighbourhood was a little rough around the edges, Teed says it was the perfect place to start out.
“I figured how this all worked without the overhead or really the concern of failure necessarily,” he says.
“I don’t regret doing it at all. It was a learning experience and it worked and got to where I am right now.”
Today Pristine is located on historic King Street. When you walk in, you’re greeted with local music, exposed brick, reclaimed wood panels and floating shelves stocked with hoodies, shirts, boards and hats. Cozy in the back is Emerald Aesthetics, owned and operated by Teed’s girlfriend Kyla Cawley (that’s right, you can shop, get a manicure and a massage all in one place). The whole place has a warm industrial vibe.
“This place is definitely reflective of my experience travelling and just being in the industry from a young age, ” Teed says. “It’s more of a big city, urban lifestyle fashion store with unique brands that most people in the city, unless they were travelling around looking for it, wouldn’t know existed.”
Pristine is not just a pretty place. Teed makes sure his team knows what they’re talking about.
“We’re all younger dudes that work really hard together. We’re very knowledgeable of what we’re doing,” he says. “I train all my guys on every brand. I take a lot of them on sales trips with me so they know exactly what the brand’s about, how it fits and how it wears.”
The hard work is getting recognized. Twenthy-eight-year-old Teed received the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award last November at the Saint John Chamber of Commerce’s Outstanding Business Awards.
“I had no idea that I’d win that award . . . I was really excited,” Teed says. “I got to meet a lot of people. It kind of put me on the map in the business world as well.”
This year, Teed says he hopes to grow his sales and create more designs. He prefers to stick with reasonable goals, because if there’s one thing he’s learned over the past six years: Don’t expect everything to go according to plan,
“You learn pretty quickly that things aren’t going to happen exactly the way you want,” he says.
“You conduce to what’s working and mould your store to how needs to be, versus exactly how you want it to be.”