I’ve always been on the hunt to discover the most extraordinary things the world has on offer. And suddenly, accidentally almost, the idea of High Street Maison evolved, and I found myself in the role of curator – discoverer of the best the world has to offer – brands, products and ideas – helping them find their home here in Canada, for Canadians.
Certain themes run through your whole life, showing up over and over in different forms, long before you understand why. You don’t choose them. You just notice, eventually, that you’ve been circling the same thing since childhood. And the interesting part isn’t any one of those themes on its own; the interesting part is the intersection between them, the place where two things you’ve always loved take shape and suddenly make sense. If you can do that as a job, consider yourself one of the luckiest people on the planet, and that’s where the magic happens.
One of my earliest reflections of this pattern is from when I was about 15 years old, though it took me another twenty years to see the whole picture. My parents generously took our family to Europe for the summer, even providing my siblings and me travel spending money, ten dollars for every year of our age. We hit 10 countries that summer, England, Scotland, France, Spain, Morocco, and in each one I found myself hunting. Not for souvenirs. For the one object that captured the place, that was worth carrying home, keeping memories and telling the story of our adventures together that summer.
I remember vividly the Aston Martin keychain I bought in Italy, not because it was flashy, but because even at that age, something in me already knew the difference between a brand that shouts and one that’s confidently well made, aesthetically pleasing and made with real intention. When I went back to school that September, I must have had a dozen keychains hanging from the zippers of my Mountain Equipment Co-op backpack. Each one chosen, not collected. I don’t remember if anyone noticed, (though I secretly hoped they would)… What I remember is the hunt, becoming fully absorbed in how an object felt in my hand, whether it was pretty enough to earn its spot, what it would mean once it made it home.
Travel was never something I grew out of – in fact it’s a huge part of how I see myself today. I’ve travelled to nearly a hundred countries now, and it isn’t nostalgia, it’s driven by a need to explore, to see, to discover. Every new place asks the same question that Italy did: what’s here that I’ve never seen, and how will these experiences shape me? The only difference is I’m not looking for what fits on a zipper anymore. I’m looking for what should be on our shelves in Canada and how I can share these experiences with my community.
That instinct never left, it just changed shape. As a teenager, once my parents had gone to bed, I’d close my door and rearrange my room, shuffling furniture, repositioning my sports medals, reorganizing shelves, redecorating the bathroom. When I lived in London in my 20s, I really came into my own, building on and understanding my personal style aesthetic, investing in health, wellness and self care, learning what made a room feel alive instead of just furnished. I still walk into any new space, feel the energy and daydream about what I would do if it was mine to bring to life.
London was also the place where skincare stopped being about whatever was on trend, with the loudest packaging and started being about how my skin actually felt. That shift, from buying what was marketed hardest to seeking out products made with the best ingredients, by brands that truly cared for the planet, that really *really* worked. In stepped Neal’s Yard Remedies, I loved their Borough Market store. This is the same standard I hold every brand to now.
Running alongside both of those passions, for as long as I can remember, is business. In kindergarten, my journal entry on April 30 read: “Today is the last day of tax season.” What kind of kindergarten kid talks about that! All through grade school, when someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was sure I wanted to be “a client.” I didn’t know a client of what, exactly. I just knew it was a word that carried weight in my house, that being one meant something. I was fluent in the language of business before I understood a single word of it. I would set up a table at the door of the pantry around dinnertime, selling my mom her own groceries she needed to make a meal. When visiting my Dad’s office, and I would ask for ‘business words’ – writing them on the whiteboard – acquisition, corporate finance or strategy – without a clue as to what they meant.
If you’d asked that kid what the job actually was, underneath words she didn’t have yet, it was never going to be “distributor.” If you got her daydreaming, she might have been able to tell you that she wanted to travel the world to find the most extraordinary things, and bring them home for inspiration. Line them up, get excited about each one, figure out where they belong.
That’s become the actual job. Curator of the world’s most beautiful things. High Street Maison is that passion, turned into a company.
There are exceptional international brands Canadians have never heard of, and it’s rarely because the product isn’t good enough. It’s because entering Canada, the customs, the bilingual labelling, the retail relationships, is genuinely hard to navigate alone. Regulatory requirements, logistics, and a market that looks similar to the US on paper and behaves nothing like it in practice. Most founders building something extraordinary don’t have the bandwidth to also become experts in Canadian market entry. That’s the actual barrier, far more often than product quality or demand.
That’s the problem High Street Maison exists to solve. We’re the curator: we find and partner with brands worth bringing into Canada, brands with the same care in their making that I used to look for in a keychain. And then we do the unglamorous, essential work of building them a real home here, distribution, compliance, retail relationships, the whole path from container to shelf. It’s brands like Evolve Organic Beauty and Yin Your Skin – brands we can stand behind and work closely with to go further, together.
Maison means house. That’s not an accident. Our job is to take a brand or a product that was built with intention somewhere else in the world and give it a proper home in Canada, one where it’s positioned, supported, and set up to actually be found by the people who’ll value it.
We’re also going to start publishing what we know. Entering Canada shouldn’t be a mystery that only insiders understand. Over the coming months we’ll be putting out straightforward guides on the real questions every international brand asks before entering this market. It’s not our proprietary playbook, it is the honest, practical answers, made freely available so we can demystify and open up our market to the best the world has to offer. If you’re a founder wondering whether Canada makes sense for you, that’s exactly who this is for.
This is the intersection. The place where the separate threads turn out to be one thing. The hunt for beautiful things worth bringing home. The work of building a proper home for them once they arrive. High Street Maison is where that intersection for me, finally has a name.