Colour Me Pretty is closing the doors to both of its locations after six years.
The clothing store opened as a home business in 2014 and as a retail storefront in 2016, eventually expanding to a children’s boutique, in 2019.
After a drop in sales, store owner Julie Fudge said she felt a mental and emotional toll and made the hard decision to let the shops go.
“It was something I had hoped we could have done forever but in the last year alone I just felt like I was swimming against the tide. It was always one thing after another financially.”
She has lived in the region for 13 years and since opening her first store she felt the business community was a family.
“In three and a half years I’ve made connections with people I would have never have known or interacted with otherwise. You get close to these other boss babes and they become family, so it hurts to see that we’re all struggling.”
Since announcing that her stores are closing several others have reached out to Fudge relating to the position that she is in and wondering if they should also close their doors.
“It’s hard considering I’ve been here for 13 years and the first three quarters of my time here was in a boom and money was indispensable and now you see customers coming and their pinching a 20 dollar bill and wondering ‘should I spend this or should I not,’ it’s difficult to see how far we’ve come.”
Aside from the economic downturn, Fudge noted that online shopping is making it difficult for locally owned and operate shops to stay afloat.
She agreed that some local stores may be overpriced however some are fair, causing business owners to have taken quite the hit with overhead.
“We’re in this generation that wants everything right now and as cheap as you can get it, which is understandable with the climate here in Fort Mac…It’s really difficult for anyone that’s not a huge chain to survive.”
For the past three years the city has into into the top five for Amazon’s 20 most romantic cities in Canada based on data from the sales.
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She does see where online shoppers are coming from.
“To one extent I could understand why, it’s quick, it has so much more than us small business owners could offer, but I feel the reason so many people are shopping online is because of the stigma that has been created, ‘everything that is overpriced when it is local.”
A point of view the city has been trying to change.
READ MORE: Municipality launches shop local campaign
“I know everyone keeps saying shop local and it’s become used and abused and it’s become annoying, but I would just like people to know that when you shop through websites, you’re shopping through a factory.”
Through her business alone she helped support and uplift local women, hockey teams, mental health initiatives and the economy.
“We were bringing in money, but we also took a lot of our profits and donated them, that was one of the core things we wanted to do through our business.”
Fudge said it was never about the profits, they just wanted to make a difference in the city.
