Archive News from Digital Main Street

For more than 50 years, surfers have quietly searched the coves and coastlines of the Great Lakes looking for surfable waves.

It’s a niche love, especially given that waves are often best in the fall and winter when temperatures plummet and the lakes wake up, but the barrier to entry is less the cold and more the lack of access to the right gear for surfing.

A record store is not a store. Sure, you buy products there. But it’s more than that. Stepping into a record store isn’t just buying a record, it’s hunting for an idea, for a feeling – it has sounds, the slap of sleeves being pored over; it has scents, fresh polymer for new pressings and reissues, decaying acids and paper for the classics.

And it’s also an exchange, even when verbal exchanges between record store owners and customers are limited, a silent promise is made, a promise to support not just that store but an entire industry. 

For Ungalli Clothing Co. founders Hailey and Bree Hollinsworth reading The Name of the Tree by Celia Barker Lottridge was a near-nightly occurrence in their childhood. Based on a Bantu folk tale, The Name of the Tree tells the story of a drought and the last fruit-bearing tree that will only lower its branches to those who know its name.

It’s a book that held the co-founders’ imaginations as children, a book that’s simple in its message: we can accomplish great things when we band together.

For Fancy That, a Kingston-based fashion boutique, e-commerce was looking like a hard “no.” Four years ago they set up a bit of a digital presence through social media, says Amanda Cronk of the family-run business.

It was to push in the world of Instagram and Facebook, “But at no point were we ever thinking that we would go online sales-wise,” says Cronk.

“We had thought about it years ago when it was starting to become a thing and pretty much immediately we're like, that's not really our thing.”

For most of the year, Perth is a small town of 6,000 people. But every summer, cottagers and visitors flood the area along the Rideau waterway pushing that catchment area to close to 60,000. “It’s crazy busy,” says Kari Clarke, coordinator for the Perth BIA.

The town’s summer music festival and events like the Guinness World Record-breaking Kilt Run bring an influx of people to the area, drawing fresh shoppers and diners to the main street and boosting business.

As hospitals struggled with an influx in COVID-19 related patients, Toronto’s Manis Cosmetic Consulting decided to do something bold.

Helen Manis, the medical spa owner and a Registered Practical Nurse with nearly 20 years of experience in medical aesthetics and skincare, committed to donating 100 percent of profits from product purchases in April towards funding hospital supplies in Ontario.

If 2020 could be defined by one word it’d most definitely be “pivot” says chef Melanie Robinson owner of Eclectic Cafe in Orillia.

The cafe, a seated affair spun out of and run by Melanie Robinson Catering, had only been open a handful of months when the pandemic forced it to shut its doors temporarily.

Couple that with the challenges of running a catering outfit when gatherings are illegal, and you’ve got a decidedly weird year.

To Molly Farquharson, fibre art is hard to translate digitally.

It eludes the camera lens, the effect of every stitch and curled piece of fibre somehow lost somewhere in the ether between the aperture and the digitized image of the work.

Going back to normal after the pandemic may never really be all that normal. Too much time has passed.

People have sat with themselves, they’ve had to learn things about themselves the pace of ordinary life doesn’t seem to allow for. And it might end up being a good thing.

The hype was fun and Les Sabilano lived in it for a while. Eight years ago, as the world seemed to be discovering Toronto’s restaurant scene, the restaurateur and co-owner of Lamesa Filipino Kitchen was introducing the city to the staples of Filipino cuisine, an elevated riff on the takeout favourites hocked by the Scarborough (and later St. Clair West) markets Sabilano’s parents had run since the late-80s.