New Brunswick’s Ella Opening Retail Store in Saint John
SAINT JOHN – One stylish New Brunswick startup is making a leap from your smartphone to the street.
Ella, a mobile app that allows women to sell premium pre-owned clothes to each other, is going beyond the click by opening a retail store at 101 Prince William Street in uptown Saint John called The Shop- by Ella.
Ella founder Kelly Lawson says the idea to open a brick and mortar location came from feedback from Ella’s app users.
“A year ago, if you told me that we would become bricks and mortar, I would have told you that was not happening,” she says. “Our original mission was that it would just be strictly online marketplace, so it truly was an evolution to get to this point. That came from talking to our users and finding from them what was working and what wasn’t working.”
Many users said one of the biggest issues when it comes to selling fashion items online was figuring out the logistics of finding a place to meet, especially if it was a piece of clothing you wanted try on first.
“It just seemed to make sense to take this next step and help make the reselling of fashion a convenient, fun experience,” Lawson says.
The store will provide a safe, convenient and fun place for users of the app to meet and exchange previously owned fashion pieces (if they want to). Ella will also offer a range of new fashion items from top Canadian designers, and carefully curated vintage pieces from brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel. With many other fashion shops already in Saint John, Lawson says she wants to set Ella to provide something different.
“We are working with Canadian designers, primarily in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto…We’re avoiding the fast-fashion and keeping it close to home,” she says. “We’d like to carry things that no one else here does. It wouldn’t make any sense to duplicate what’s already here. There’s already a lot of fashion businesses here that are doing a fantastic job.”
Lawson says the Saint John shop will serve as a minimum viable product (MVP) for Ella. Long term, she envisions Ella shops in different cities across Canada.
“This is really going to be like our lab in a way for testing out how this works and how the exchanges work when people are dropping things off an reselling them using our store. When we figure out what works here, the goal would be to open in our other market places across Canada.”
The Shop-by Ella is expected to open by the end of September.