One location is set to open at Mayfair Shopping Centre, with the other to be launched in Burnaby at Brentwood Mall.
American lifestyle company L.L.Bean is set to open two stores in B.C. later this year. A location at Mayfair Shopping Centre in Victoria is slated to open in August, according to the brand, with another store set to open in Burnaby at Brentwood Mall in the fall.
“We’ve done our market research, and we feel like now is the time,” Howie Kastner, President of Jaytex Group, L.L.Bean’s Canadian partner, says of the company’s planned expansion into the province.
Started in Freeport, Maine, in 1912 by namesake founder Leon Leonwood Bean, the company set up its first bricks-and-mortar store in Canada in Oakville, Ontario in 2019. Buoyed by “market research and customer requests,” the company followed that initial store opening with three more locations in Ontario in 2020. Two additional Canadian stores are expected to open in Calgary and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in the fall as well.
“It was really the heat map that we created based on the online business,” Kastner explains of the location choices. “Victoria was a definite hot spot, and also the Vancouver area.”
