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A growing number of Canadians looking to make their mark
in the business world find New York the perfect place to start
Kathryn Engel
Strolling through a box store anywhere in North America, you’d have to have blinders on to not see one Canadian woman’s unique designs.
Born and raised in Ottawa, Christiane Lemieux has built what has been called one of New York City’s most successful SMEs with her $22-million Dwell- Studio in the city’s SoHo district. After graduating from Queen’s University’s Parson School of Design, Lemieux headed to New York where she started working in fashion design with Gap and Isaac Minrati. But soon after, her life path would move into the area of textile and furniture design after another Canadian woman also living in NYC called Lemieux to report the friend and her husband had just purchased Portico – a home furnishing company – and wanted to know if she’d come on board.
“Portico already had five retail stores, and my job was the whole project of taking the products they purchased from around the world and making them private labels,” Lemieux says of the almost overnight international education. “I learned everything from international shipping and sourcing and design, furniture design, you name it.”
Lemieux soon started to sense what she describes as a “seismic shift” in the industry, and one that was speaking directly to her personal sense of aesthetics.
“I saw more and more of a demand for the kinds of products I had started to dribble into the stores, that I personally like more. It was more of a taste in modern aesthetics, and I saw a demand for that and thought, ‘This is more of something I really want to pursue and where my heart is and what is really the most exciting for me.’ The owner didn’t share that desire in taste and didn’t want to move in that direction, so I left and started my own company.”
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