You two were both pretty young when you kicked off with HAVEN. Many people go through life without ever having the balls to go do their own thing and they’re caught in someone else’s shadow and living an obscure life. I’m sure the freedom you have now calling all the shots has in its own way an inmeasurable value. Art mentions that there was a decent foundation for retail, but what were some of things that you were uncertain about? What were the biggest shocks starting off? Having mentioned some shops that were inspirational, did you have a case study or particular store you drew inspiration from?

Daniel: Owning your own business is great! It’s a lot of work but is pretty rewarding at the end of the day.
Some of the things we were uncertain about? Well I can’t really speak for Arthur, but for me it was just the uncertainty of whether or not the business would work out in the end. We’d put every dime we had into the shop, so if it didn’t work out we’d be starting all over from scratch. But that’s like any business start-up. It’s risky. Plus we always wanted to be more than just a local “community” shop. We wanted to be a “global” shop so to speak. So if things weren’t moving in that direction by now we probably would have quit.

Arthur: Another uncertainty for me at the beginning was just learning how to interpret fashion trends and to translate that into good orders. Especially having never owned a retail store before. We had to do so much research and just learn as much as we can. As a retailer you see products a full season ahead of when they are released. There are so many things that can go wrong. Trends can change, you can over-order, etc. Sometimes we’ll get a product that we thought was amazing six months ago and we just so happened to sink a lot of money into it, and now its kind of fizzled. Or maybe it showed up and turned out not to be so hot. Things like that. But as time went on we learnt a lot and got a lot smarter with our orders.

Daniel: As for one shop having more inspiration than others? No I don’t think so. At least not for me anyway. But there were a handful of shops that we looked up to that Arthur mentioned. SlamJam, The Hideout, Union, Stussy. I think those ones were big influences in the beginning.

There’s no doubt the global community created by the Internet facilitated your rise to the top of the pile for streetwear retailers. Did you have a certain plan and approach to your online presence. I obviously know how Edmonton is and how small of a market it is and in reality you’re probably entering an unsustainable business model if you keep to only Edmonton as your primary market.

Daniel: To be honest we never initially had plans to open up the online shop. You could always stay a local, community based shop and still make a decent living if you wanted to. But we quickly realized that if we wanted to grow our business at the rate we desired, something had to be done. So a couple of years ago we took a look at our options and saw that there was a huge gap in quality online retail for hard to find streetwear. More specifically we thought we could bring a more user friendly online shopping experience than what was out there. That, coupled with our powerful brand list was a recipe for success in our minds.

Arthur: Thanks for the kind words, but I still think there is a long way to go before we are at the top of the pile so called “streetwear”. We just work really hard and try to do what we like. I often think that if you are really passionate about what you are doing and it is genuinely something unique and well thought out, people will take notice. The market in Edmonton is small but it is growing at quite a strong rate for sure and our local customers really support and appreciate what we are doing for the city. The economy is still incredibly strong here but the Internet has no doubt helped us. Much like what Dan said we set some goals for ourselves at the start of the business and for us to grow at the rate we wanted to we knew that the Internet and e-commerce retailing was the next step. The city itself could not sustain the level of growth we wanted. We didn’t really have a game plan when we started, but we always wanted to be a globally recognized retailer from the get go and the Internet was the way to facilitate it. We just went with the flow and call it luck or not but things just progressively got better and better. We we’re able to take a little more risks on certain brands or products now because of it.

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