The Rocky Mountains are home to The Sugar Pine Company, a mother-daughter owned quilt shop featuring a large selection of quilting fabrics and supplies. Operating for ten years, The Sugar Pine Company is located in the lovely resort town of Canmore, at the boundary of Banff National Park. Home to 13,000 people, Canmore is visited by over a million tourists each year from around the globe who come to experience the wonder and adventure of the Canadian Rockies.
Currently featured as one of North America’s top quilt shops in Quilt Sampler Magazine ® , a Better Homes and Gardens ® publication, The Sugar Pine Company has recently gained the attention of quilters world-wide. With ongoing growth, friendly service, and a wonderful selection, The Sugar Pine Company has become a destination for visitors. The director at our local Travel Alberta Tourist Information Center tells us that visitors to the Center request our shop brochure more often than any other brochure. The business community of Canmore realizes that a great quilt shop draws many visitors, and the Chamber of Commerce presented us with their most recent Business of the Year Award for making a significant contribution to the local economy and for creating a successful business in a niche market.
We started our shop when the local general fabric store was for sale. Seeing the possibilities and wanting to give the struggling little shop an identity, we took over the business, changed its name, and began the process of transforming a tiny general sewing store into a specialty quilt shop. Gradually building the inventory and customer base, we worked on providing exceptional and personal customer service, while steadily adding to our inventory and educational offerings. One of the most positive things we did to create growth for our business was to participate in Merchants’ Malls at quilt shows. We set up attractive displays and talked to as many people as possible, spreading the word that there was a not-to-miss shop in Canmore. We expanded our first location, then outgrew it and moved to a bigger store, which we also expanded and then outgrew. The Sugar Pine’s current location, our third, suits us well, with lots of on-site parking and 5,000 square feet of retail space.
We divide the workload according to our personal abilities and preferences. We work together on purchasing fabric and much of the store’s inventory. Claire, mother of the team, does the bookwork and works in the store. Daughter Leah plans the store’s events, displays, and projects. Leah’s husband, Dean, also works in the store, looking after our Husqvarna Viking sewing machine department, maintaining inventory, running the ever-growing mail order business, and creating the store’s website and newsletters. Adam Bank, Claire’s husband, helps in many ways, building fixtures for the shop, and helping customers when we get too busy.
We are fortunate at The Sugar Pine Company to have an outstanding team of nine staff. All part-time, our staff members come from varied backgrounds and bring many wonderful abilities along with them. They are a dedicated group and work hard to keep up with a fast-paced environment. Most of our staff has been recruited from among our best customers. As we have gotten to know these talented, friendly, and capable quilters, they have been invited to join our team, and we are grateful to have them on board with us!
 When a customer enters The Sugar Pine Company, they sense the warm, bright, inviting atmosphere and the friendly, relaxed service. With warm woodwork and attractive displays, many visitors browse for a long time, enjoying the ambiance. We are relaxed and informal with our customers, giving them plenty of freedom to explore, and providing personal service when it is desired. We work hard to create attractive, themed displays which our customers will enjoy, and which will inspire them to purchase products. Careful planning of shop displays and store projects contributes greatly to turning over inventory and to generating excitement among customers. We manage to create a new shop sample quilt at least once a week, and new offerings and displays keep the store interesting for visitors.
We feel very grateful to live and work in such a beautiful setting, and look for projects which convey our “sense of place” to feature in our shop. Visitors often want to take home a piece of the Rockies with them, whether “home” is only a block or two away, or on the other side of the world, and we look for items that will make this possible. An enjoyable and interesting mix of customers shop at The Sugar Pine Company, with a great group of locals, plus many regional and international visitors. We are delighted to see regular customers who travel from many areas in the Western provinces. Because we are located in an international tourist destination, quilters from everywhere travel in our region, and it is a treat to have them make a point of visiting our shop. From across Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Mexico, Europe, The Middle East, Japan, Australia, and South Africa, some visitors come back every year for a vacation and a “fabric spree”, bringing an empty suitcase that they will carry home filled with new fabrics.
We carry 8,000 quilting fabrics in many different styles. Numerous fabric collections are featured, lots of kits, over seven hundred flannels, and a good collection of batiks and brights are popular. In addition to quilting fabrics, we stock outerwear fabrics as well as some basic sewing fabrics and fun fabrics which can be used for costumes, embellishing, and decorating. Husqvarna Viking machines, sewing notions, fun knitting and couching yarns, and crafts supplies add to the selection. Providing these general sewing and knitting items is an important way of serving a broad group of local customers, rather than losing them from our customer base because they are not quilting.
We have been successful at drawing people into the shop using advertising, but we have learned by trial and error that some advertising isn’t effective for us. Advertising in the local paper and at local events has yielded disappointing results. What has worked well is advertising in publications directed at tourists and visitors. The downside is that good-quality publications aimed at tourists are very expensive to advertise in, but their wide-spread distribution and brand recognition makes it worthwhile. We include a coupon in the tourist-directed advertising so we can measure the response to the ads. We also advertise on the local cable TV channel, and many locals and visitors have found us this way. Publications aimed at traveling quilters are also very effective advertising media for us. We always design our own ads, so that we can get exactly what we want. The internet is a very important advertising tool, and because we have created our own website and update it ourselves, it is cost-effective. Our website features shop information, our event information, and some of our current kits - we are working on adding more of our kits to our site. We presently spend about 3% of our gross sales on advertising.
Our in-store hours are designed with customer convenience in mind, open seven days a week and every evening. Open 9 am to 9 pm from Monday to Saturday, and 11 am to 8 pm on Sunday, we are available to serve locals as well as visitors traveling on a busy itinerary.
In our ten-year history, we have made plenty of mistakes. One of the worst errors we made was losing a wonderful employee when another retailer (not a competitor) offered her more than we were paying her. In retrospect, we should have matched the competing offer and kept her on staff, since she was really an outstanding staff member with a work ethic that matched our own - very rare these days!
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When we receive advice or suggestions, we have learned the hard way to follow only those that coincide with our own vision. When we have run an event or purchased a product line because a friend/colleague talked us into it, it has brought nothing but trouble and grief.
On occasions when we buy fabric that doesn’t sell well, we try to incorporate the slow-moving fabrics into a small, inexpensive kitted project to help move as much as we can at the regular retail price - this usually works reasonably well. We also cut it up and bundle it attractively to help it move. If that fails, we use the bundles as door prizes at our many events, and give away fat quarters of it at the checkout to customers who make significant purchases. We have a permanent clearance section that slow-moving bolts are marked down and sold from. Customers who are price-sensitive or looking for charity-quilt fabrics or backings make a point of clearing out our clearance section for us.
Another mistake was to devote a lot of time, in this case hundreds of hours, to a local non-profit organization in the hope that they would reciprocate by displaying loyalty to our shop. They didn’t, and along with that lost time, we lost many opportunities to build our own business. We now support groups with donations of product but only with limited donations of time, since it is our most precious resource. Having said that, involvement in our community is very important to us, and we do support our local quilt guild with special discounts and donations of numerous items. We also co-sponsor an annual workshop with our guild which features a well-known special guest instructor. This event helps to generate revenue for our guild and brings exciting learning opportunities to quilters in our small mountain town. In a time where many shops and guilds unfortunately do not work together, we are proud of our relationship with our local guild and pleased to have opportunities to participate with them in their educational and charitable programs.
We provide donations to many charities, including local athletics, schools, day care, and other fund-raisers. With the help of our customers and staff, we have made quilts which we donated to local hospitals for raffles, raising about $3,000 each time. Our current major charity quilt is for the Banff Center and will be auctioned at their 30 th Anniversary Ball this summer.
We dislike the idea of training customers to wait for a sale to make their purchases. Hence, we have only one sale each year, lasting two days in June. A Customer- Appreciation event, it clears a lot of older stock to make way for the new collections arriving from Spring Quilt Market.
Another mistake was wasting time and energy worrying about competition from online “shops” and from vendors selling goods from their homes. While stressing over actions taken by competitors on a non-level playing field, we lost momentum to focus on doing what we do best - creating an inviting, inspiring storefront success. It is really true that when we attend to our own business, it flourishes, but our business is hurt when we start to waste our energy worrying about something or someone we can’t control.
Successes that we have enjoyed have occurred because we have taken risks and have planned exciting special events.
Risks involved moving our store from a well-established and busy location because we needed more space to showcase our products. The move proved to be successful because we informed customers as far in advance as possible, and we set up the new space to be more inviting and attractive than the previous one.
We took a costly risk to establish our major event, t he Canadian Rockies Quilt Art Canmore Conference, five days featuring workshops with seven world-class instructors. The Conference began with encouragement from a friend who is a local quilt artist, and because we recognized a need in Western Canada for excellence in instruction and support for quilters wanting to do innovative work. The 2006 Conference will be the fifth annual, and participants travel from around the globe to take part in the outstanding opportunities for instruction and inspiration in the beautiful Canadian Rockies. Our Conference has grown steadily, and the response has been so positive that planning and organizing it is now the major aspect of the work that Leah does.
We work hard to create time to develop our own quilt projects which we then offer in kit form for customers. These projects have been successful and often are based on a rustic lodge theme, perfect for customers who love our mountain location in the forest. We have also been very privileged to work with some talented local designers who have custom-created patterns for us using our fabrics and ideas, and sometimes depicting our own mountains as the subject of the quilts. These patterns and kits are our best-sellers, as residents and visitors alike seek to personalize their quilts, or to depict a sense of place and the majesty of our surroundings in their quilts.
A full schedule of in-store classes keeps our customers and students busy with new projects. We offer classes for all levels of quiltmakers, from novice to advanced. Eleven teachers, some of whom are also shop staff, share their many talents with our students. Some of our teachers have won major awards for their own work, and all are supportive, conscientious, and professional. Class sizes are kept small and personal, averaging five or six students. Classes are scheduled throughout fall, winter, and spring, and feature many aspects of quiltmaking. We do not hold summer classes because we are too busy during that peak period to manage any activity taking place in the store other than serving customers and re-stocking.
As well as quilting classes, Claire specializes in teaching kids to sew, and many of her kids come back session after session, eager to learn from a patient and attentive teacher. Also offered are classes in home dec, fabric painting, polar fleece wearables, and quilted wearables.
 Special workshops with well-known international instructors add excitement and challenge to the class offerings. We have made many new friends among the students who have traveled from across western Canada and the U.S. to participate in these special workshops. Other special events include our annual Shop Hop, hosted with four other shops in and around Calgary. The Shop Hop is very popular with customers, featuring an exclusive quilt project with kits for each step available at each shop, and many prizes, including a computerized sewing machine. We also host a weekly stitch club in our classroom, the Twisted Stitchers, who find the shop a fun and inspiring place to gather.
The Sugar Pine Company is a founding partner in Calgary SewFest, an organization of three regional quilt shops which annually brings exceptional quilt displays and workshops to Calgary. A one-of-a-kind show which features 300 original works by quilt and fiber artists, Calgary SewFest 2006 features workshops with Joen Wolfrom and many entries in the major international design challenges.
While our natural environment provides ample inspiration, customers tell us the atmosphere & service inside The Sugar Pine inspires them as well. Our extensive selection of top-quality quilting fabrics provides an unparalleled shopping experience for our customers. We offer our customers artistic, inspiring, and ever-changing displays, featuring a variety of techniques and approaches to quiltmaking. Our educational programs offer a broad range of opportunities for all levels and styles. We try to make each customer feel special and go out of our way to ensure visitors leave with their needs met. Our goal for all our guests is to make each visit to The Sugar Pine Company a memorable, remarkable experience. When visitors come in and exclaim “My friend was right- this is a quilt shop I wouldn’t want to miss!!” we know we’ve been doing our job.
By Leah Murphy
The Sugar Pine Company
Unit 1 737 Tenth Street, Canmore, AB. T1W 2A3
Tel: (403) 678-9603. Fax: (403) 678-4703
Email: quilting@thesugarpine.com
Web: www.thesugarpine.com
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