Archive News from Digital Main Street

For most of Monique Paajanen’s life, the birds dancing on tree branches and swirling overhead were a mild curiosity. Sure, Paajanen and her sister, Danielle Audrey, had grown up feeding them from time to time and their father built birdhouses and feeders as a hobby. But the true spark of curiosity that would eventually lead to Paajanen and Audet opening Backyard Birder, their Sudbury shop, came when Paajanen met her husband Tapio.

Thunder Bay’s Windy Shores Café was borne of a dinner conversation between Natasha Allan, her husband Kyle and his brother Cory. Cory was relocating his shop KÜHL Interiors to Marina Park and envisioned a coffee shop linked to his store. “(Cory) was asking if we knew anyone who would want to open a coffee shop,” says Allan. “My husband and I looked at each other and said why don't we open a business? It was kind of spur-of-the-moment.”

Entrepreneurship can be business acumen and strategy and audacity and instincts and whatever words will contain the uncontainable but more than that it is endurance – it’s your ability to capture and keep pace with your vision while the world changes around you. Audrey O’Marra’s Art Rocks & Healing Yoga Café in Dunnville is a manifestation of that sentiment.  

Steve Knight connaît bien les révolutions numériques : dans les années 1980, il en a dirigé une. Propriétaire de la boutique
The Jewellery Judge, un commerce d’expertise et d’évaluation de bijoux, il a innové dans les expertises aidées par ordinateur. « On m’a dit qu’il n’était pas possible d’utiliser un ordinateur pour faire ce travail », déclare-t-il. « J’ai répondu : vraiment? Regardez-moi faire! Et j’ai créé un logiciel qui fait des expertises et qui est maintenant utilisé partout dans le
monde.

The village of Westport has always benefitted from swarms of Americans seeking to capitalize on the exchange rate while they vacation at the head of the navigable Rideau Canal. But the summer of 2020 seemed to promise something different for businesses like Seasons of Westport, Lori Reynen’s women fashion and accessory shop.

There’s this moment Jordan Malka remembers from the early months of Beacon Bike and Brew where a local dad started reading a children’s book in the back of the Picton café and a small crowd of kids gathered around. “There must’ve been five or six random couples visiting with kids, and the kids are all just sitting there while he read,” says Malka.

 
Physio In The Valley is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It’s been 20 years since Donna and Paul Saal left behind the small practice they’d opened in Lively, Ontario and moved back to Pembroke. “Everybody thought we were crazy,” says Saal. “I had a newborn baby, a successful physio clinic… and we just completely turned our lives upside down.”