Live Here, Shop Here is a Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows News campaign that spans the holiday season to spotlight the value of shopping local.
It is the high degree of expertise and personal service that people receive when they shop local, something typically missing when shopping at big box stores and online retailers.
There is also hometown pride that comes with being the person behind the counter of a local shop.
Brittney Johnson is the owner of a boutique gift store in the quaint Pitt Meadows area called Osprey Village.
Coastal Collective & Co not only features a mix of locally sourced products, but also unique finds from around the world.
“I’m always happy to offer help to find the perfect gift. I get excited when somebody comes in and mentions something obscure that their friend likes and we happen to have the perfect gift for it,” said Johnson, who opened her store seven years ago.
Johnson loves working in Osprey Village because, she said, a lot of the business owners are young entrepreneurs like herself.
And she also loves her customers, and has grown to know a lot of them well over the years. She has seen some of her customers get married, have children, and see their children grow. There are also the sad moments when she is told a resident pup has passed away.
“We have, like, these personal experiences and we’ve grown our little community and it’s nice to have that at work,” she said.
Rob Laluk, who owns Pitt Meadows Cycle with his wife Janet, advises people not to buy something simply because it is local. Buy it because it is a quality item.
“Buy awesome,” said the Pitt Meadows native and cycling enthusiast.
Laluk, who is usually the first person customers encounter at the store – along with store mascot, four-year-old Mikey, part collie, part retriever – curates all of the cycling products in the shop.
They don’t carry eight million pairs of cycling gloves, just ones specifically curated for the weather in this region of Canada, explained Laluk.
The bicycle brand Giant has 320 models of bikes, he added, but they only carry about 150 of them, because the ones they sell are curated for the terrain in this area.
“We have bikes that are awesome,” he said. “Buy with knowledge, buy a good product,” he advised.
Laluk has worked in the bicycle industry for 25 years, and he said, what they offer customers is quality of product and of service.
They are also well known for their 24 hour service for fixing bicycles.
“We want to fix bikes, we want people to ride bikes. We don’t want to store bikes,” he said.
Johnson is happy to stock her store with local suppliers like Lane Way Naturals, a soap and body care business in Maple Ridge, and Jars by Jodi, a mason jar cookie and dessert mix business in Pitt Meadows.
Shopping local means everything to Johnson, it’s something she has built her career on.
She believes it is very important if people want the little, more unique stores to stay open, and not just the giant American retailers.
“Or we will have no soul left,” she stated.
• Check out upcoming Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows News editions for more stories in our Live Here, Shop Here series.
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