Jeremy and Felicity Youngward and their first son moved to Cranbrook from Edmonton in 2010, taking up Felicity’s parents on an opportunity to run one of the motels on the strip, but they were both looking to do something else together.
WATCH:
So when they were walking past Great Western Garage Sale at 16 11th Ave S and the sign in the window said the business was for sale as a turnkey, they saw it as an opportunity that was too good to pass up. They have now taken over ownership from operator Cub Lea, and given the store a new name: Retro Sound and Collectibles.
“The first thing actually was to have a lot of conversations with the original owner and get his take on what his current customers looked for in the store, what was working so to speak and build from that,” said Jeremy Youngward.
READ MORE: Soulfood settles into historic Baker Hotel
“We also had our own ideas,” Youngward continued. “It’s a challenge to take an established business and say okay, how much of it do we want to keep as is, because it’s working and how much of it do we want to bring in on our own to sort of give it our own flavour so to speak.”
One major example of this is that the new owners will focus much more heavily on the music side of the business, both on the albums and instruments, while focusing less on the “garage sale” facet.
“That’s just a market that I think is taken care of already,” Youngward explained. “But we really wanted to make it a pure music store I guess, for lack of a better word and build from that.”
The grand reopening of the store will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, Feb.16 intentionally coinciding with the Winter Blitz event that’s happening on Baker Street. Their opening will start at around 3:00 and they will be open all the way until 9 p.m.
“We’re going to have coffee and hot chocolate and Tim Bits and things like that for people,” Youngward said. “And we just invite them to come and check the store out and if they’ve been before, come and see what’s new, if they haven’t been before to check it out and see what we’ve got.”
Both Jeremy and Felicity are really excited about being a part of downtown Cranbrook.
“’We’ve been big downtown boosters for as long as we’ve been here,” he said. “It’s nice to see there are pockets that are growing and certainly when we were making the decision to take this step, whether to take the store over, we were happy to see things like Fire House of course at the one end of the street and now we’ve got Soulfood at this end of the street, so between that and the studio next door there it seemed like it was going to be a good fit for everybody.”