My Home Mercantile Owner Puts Moncton Shop Up For Sale
MONCTON – The Truro-based owner of My Home Mercantile has put the store’s downtown-Moncton home up for sale.
Miriah Kearney tells Huddle she plans to sell the assets belonging to the store’s 805 Main Street location but will keep the store’s Truro location open.
“It’s bittersweet because I love the staff that work for me, they’ve been my original staff since day one. I feel like I really built something up in Moncton,” says Kearney.
“I’m ready to do something different. We evolve as businesses and I feel like it’s symbolic of my evolution and what the next chapter holds.”
Kearney says that next chapter will be a second business she’s opened in her hometown – Seek Wilderness Accommodations, a five-cabin and two-yurt hospitality business adjacent to Truro’s 3,000-acre Victoria Park.
While things are going smoothly at the Moncton location, Kearney plans to double down on what she’s doing in Truro and says it’s a little too much to have a separate Moncton-based My Home Mercantile on her mind with all of that.
“I just want to focus my efforts into my new venture and I don’t want my attention to be divided that way anymore. I think if you have a business you have to be able to give it 100 percent, and I just don’t have that capability anymore,” she says.
“[Seek Wilderness] has become quite a large project for me and I therefore don’t have time to invest.”
Potential Sale
Kearney, who announced that the Moncton location was up for sale in mid-January, has already gotten some bites from prospective buyers.
These buyers included numerous people from across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick – many of whom already run similar businesses themselves.
“There’s a range of people and there’s been considerable interest from the beginning. People showing interest to buy is a wonderful feeling because on social media everyone’s like, ‘Oh no, it’s my favourite store,’ and ‘I really hope someone continues to do that.’ It makes me really happy to see how much people love the business and how much it means to them,” says Kearney.
Kearney says the sale includes the cost of the fixtures – including racks, display pieces, and supplies totalling around $40,000 – and whatever the cost of inventory at the time of sale.
“That could range, depending on where we’re sitting. It’s a great opportunity to start a business because everything’s already set up and done – they basically get to come in and make it their own,” she says.
“They just have to step in and do a few minor changes.”
The minor changes she alluded to include a rebranding under a new name, since Kearney is planning to make an asset sale.
“I’m not actually selling the business, so really, it’s a pretty simple transaction. People still want to make sure they can crunch the numbers and that they have access to the funds and are able to run it with the staff who want to stay on,” she says,
“They’d open under a new name, with a new website and a new everything. It would basically be completely the same thing – but different. It would be similar type of inventory but it would be their own.”
My Home Mercantile is a curated giftware shop that carries mostly Canadian-made goods; it was founded in 2018.
The store Mercantile employs five people in its 10 Inglis Place location in Truro, and four in Moncton.
Despite Truro’s smaller size, Kearney says the community punches above its weight with a strong downtown shopping presence, bringing a high level of foot traffic into her store for a community of its size.
Kearney also credited the hometown advantage, giving local support that augments business in Truro in a way it doesn’t in Moncton.
“Nobody shops in my Moncton store because they know me personally. I grew up here in Truro, so everybody’s quite invested in my success.”
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].