Archive News from Digital Main Street

 Shelley Gaudet always envisioned Gaudet Fitness Solutions as more than just a fitness studio. She wanted to create a community hub for women to exhale the day, to feel motivated and motivate others, a space inspired by her own fitness journey.   

In Fort Frances, if you needed precast concrete – park benches, sidewalk slabs or septic tanks – you knew Belluz Concrete had it. “Like anything else in a small town, you know where you're going to go get certain items, right?” says Mike Belluz, owner of the family-run business. “(Fort Frances) has around 8,000 people and then there are some surrounding communities but word of mouth was really how everyone found us.” 

Haldimand County is a community of communities, a unique, rural patchwork of main street towns spread out across 1,300-square-kilometres. It’s a vast area, but the threat facing small businesses across these communities remains the same: the digital divide.  

For Minto, a second run of the Digital Main Street program gave Somer Antonopoulos, business development coordinator for LaunchIt Minto, an opportunity to bring some of the area’s overlooked hamlets and junctions into the digital transformation fold. 

It feels weird to say aloud but Carol Wood has had a good November. Local Colour, her handmade crafts and art shop in the Grey Highlands community of Flesherton, wrapped up the best November since 2002 (she’s had the store since 1989) and December is already looking better than 2019. “Considering what kind of year we’re in, that is extraordinary,” says Wood. “I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I feel bad for other shops... it’s a terrible time for retail.”

Four years ago, Sadie Shewfelt joined the family business Sleepers Bed Gallery in downtown Kincardine full-time.

She’d been raised on the selling floor amongst the beds, pillows and home décor but this would be different.

Sadie recalls one of the first things her mother, Heather Shewfelt said was that she “wasn't allowed to make any changes for a year."

Misty Gibson-Traynor spent months chipping away at her digital strategy and website while running The Loop, the downtown Kincardine fashion and gift boutique she owns with her husband.

But it only took a few days – through the province’s decision to order non-essential businesses closed during the COVID-19 pandemic – to make that digital strategy The Loop’s lifeline to its customers.