Want quirky? They’ve got it
Montreal – How often do you see customers in a retail store laughing out loud at the items on display?
Happens all the time at the eclectic and whimsical gift shop Mortimer Snodgrass, where you can get everything from the Holy Toast (a mould that forms a religious image on a piece of toast) to a ski-pole potato masher called Spudski to a book entitled Farts (A Spotter’s Guide), complete with sound effects.
There are fridge magnets with ’50s-style family photos over captions like “It’s not that I’m old. Your music really does suck,” toddler t-shirts with the message “What happens at Grandma’s stays at Grandma’s,” and “Hot Hits” silicone coasters shaped like old 45s.
“Unique, useful, unusual. That’s what we’re looking for,” says co-owner Virginia Champoux, 39. “If something we have gets carried by more than a few major stores in Montreal, we drop it. The point is to be different.”
She and husband Jay Sokoloff, 38, opened their first store eight years ago in a small space on Monkland Ave. Her previous job was in public relations; he’d finished law school at the University of Ottawa but ultimately decided it wasn’t for him.
“We opened a store because it seemed like a fun thing to do,” he said.
They opened a second one on St. Paul St. in Old Montreal five years ago and shifted the Monkland store to St. Lambert in 2006.
They’re also present on the Web, and their e-commerce has snowballed in the past year, with orders coming from as far away as Russia and Dubai. “A lot of our suppliers won’t ship (to individual customers) outside the U.S. We ship anywhere. Canada Post even calculates the shipping costs automatically,” Champoux said.
