Simons to open new stores in five Canadian cities

Quebec-based fashion retailer La Maison Simons (Simons) says it will open new stores in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Mississauga and Gatineau, starting in 2015 over a two-year period.

Simons has nine stores, one in West Edmonton and eight in Quebec. It also has business offices in Hong Kong, London and Paris.

In an interview with CTV News, CEO Peter Simons said:

“We had a vision of what we wanted to accomplish and be able to do in terms of design and innovation in retail, and I felt that we had to enlarge,” CEO Peter Simons said in a phone interview. We’ll still be a very small company in the context of competition today, but we had to expand our footprint a bit to give us the freedom and flexibility to accomplish what we wanted to do.”

While the expansion will definitely involve new hiring, the retailer did not specify how many new jobs would be created.

Sketch of a planned La Maison Simons store that will be located in the North-East portion of the expanded Ottawa Rideau Centre.

The new stores will vary on size from 80,000 to 113,000 square feet and will be constructed with both new and existing structures, the company said.

The first new store, which is expected to open in August 2015, will be at Les Promenades Gatineau in Quebec. In October 2015 it plans to open another store at Park Royal in West Vancouver.

Two new stores will be opened in 2016, one at Square One in March in Mississauga and the other at the Rideau Centre in Ottawa in August.

The fifth store is scheduled to open at The Core in Calgary in 2017.