Christina Pretti started SOOP SOOP, a fashion concept store, in the early years of the 2010s and later co-ran the boutique with business partner Jordan Puopolo.
Throughout its almost twelve-year tenure on Dundas Street West, just west of Ossington, SOOP SOOP boldly introduced Toronto to high-end fashion upstart brands like Eckhaus Latta, Gauntlett Cheng, and Vaquera. The boutique was a bastion for fashion particulars—individuals with outlier taste in clothing and media for whom the call of ‘Big Luxury’ never quite appealed.
Sadly, the incomparable SOOP SOOP shuttered its windows just this November.
As a previous customer and long-time follower of the SOOP SOOP namesake, I can’t help but feel the pang of cultural loss that the shop’s closure brought about. SOOP SOOP was a true hidden gem in the classical Bourdainianstyle and, in a city like Toronto where fashion trends typically skew conformist rather than singular, a sartorial beacon.
Christina was gracious enough to meet me at a local coffee shop to chat about the highs and lows of running a high-end fashion boutique in Toronto, the still extant love for the store’s house label, and the future of SOOP SOOP.
JD: What were you up to before you started SOOP SOOP in 2013?
CP: “I was studying nutrition and working at a property management company. I just always really liked clothes and magazines. The school that I was going to was across from a Chapters Indigo, and I would [regularly] go and get a mag and stash it in my textbook. I was sitting in class and the people around me were so into nutrition and I wasn’t. I was like, maybe I’ll just try this and then I’ll do nutrition as plan B.”
What was your first obsession – clothes or magazines?
“It was clothes before magazines. [When I was younger] all I had access to was what was at Shoppers Drug Mart, and then I remember being maybe eleven or something and my sister bringing home a Seventeen magazine and my mind being blown. That’s what started the magazine obsession for me. Those are all like gateway drugs, because you just discover that there’s a bigger and bigger world. Which, you know, we have very limited access to even still in Canada.”
I’m not surprised to hear that. I remember my first time entering SOOP SOOP when I first moved to Toronto in 2019, and I had never heard of any of the magazines that you carried, but they were all really cool. Things you could never access in small town Canada. It was amazing. Why do you think we have less access in Canada? It’s a smaller market?
“Definitely a smaller market. The distribution channels are, outside of major markets like the United States and greater Europe, a disaster. We just don’t have enough of a market to warrant the big imports. There’s one main distributor that services Ontario and Québec, and essentially you order off of an Excel sheet that you can’t sort unless you export it into another sheet. It’s so archaic. It really impacts what we can bring, and ultimately people’s interest at the end of the day, too. When it arrives through those channels, [the magazines] arrive late, they’re damaged, they’re stickered heavily, there’s no cover selection. It’s really unpredictable. So, what we needed to do was circumvent those channels and find other distribution pathways, which we did over the years. The main client that dictates what that distribution system brings in is Chapters Indigo and Shoppers, and we sell different titles. So, [if it’s not selling for them] that limits our access because the distributor will stop bringing it in due to low sales, but in all actuality they just put it in the wrong hands.”
Alongside the niche magazines and clothes, SOOP SOOP had quite a strong brand identity. How did you forge that?
“It really started with the last location, coming up on eight years ago. We were approaching it like, ‘Let’s be a parody of a store, so we’re going to make it the most ‘store’ store, ever.’ That’s where the blinds, the carpet, the slat wall came in – we went in and decorated to make it look like an old store.”
I feel like around eight years ago is when the alt and ironic fashion worlds were exploding – Gauntlett Cheng, Eckhaus Latta, and most notably Vetements. Did that affect how you positioned the SOOP SOOP brand?
“I wasn’t thinking about that so much—unless we were all responding to the same thing. Maybe. The main thing for me is I remember there being this really killer editorial and being like, ‘Oh my god! That’s so jokes.’ It was this random office motif in a magazine in the basement of BMV, but the name of the magazine escapes me. I remember just thinking, ‘That’s so silly.’ We were just feeling at odds with what we were doing in a sense, so the easiest way for us to deal with that was to make fun of the whole thing and make the store ugly. I don’t know if it was just a similar inspo thing, but I can certainly see why it would attract brands like that.”
This is also around the time that e-commerce is exiting its infancy, were there some defining moments of e-comm’s effect on SOOP SOOP’s patronage?
“There were two for us and they happened in tandem. The one that was the biggest—I just remember being really struck by how many stores didn’t have an online presence at the onset of the pandemic. People we’re like, “Oh gosh, I have to make an online store and get on Shopify!” So, for us, kind of breezy. Terrifying, but we had already been online. Started online before there was a brick and mortar. We already had an in-store pickup setting, because that’s how people would secure their covers of certain magazines. So, we just changed the words to ‘curbside pickup’, and were like, ‘Okay.’ Our core customer had always been an international customer. Almost nothing sells in Canada—ninety-five percent of online orders for clothing were leaving the country. Once the pandemic hit and everyone started getting their stores online, suddenly people had a lot more options.”
What do you attribute having such a large online customer base to?
“The exchange rate, being an early adopter of having an online store, and people who wanted to have Vaquera, or Telfar, or Gauntlett Cheng, or Chin Mens, or whatever brand, would try to find stores and there were just so few online that we kind of got hit.”
You mentioned that there were two noticeable effects of the rise of mass e-commerce on SOOP SOOP, what was the second?
“When SSENSE started carrying the brands we also carried, that really took us out. Personally, I would never begrudge a brand an order, especially because the brands that we’re dealing with are so small, regardless of how big they look on social media. So, for me, it was always just kind of like, ‘Okay, do your thing.’ But I think there was a mutual respect and a really good sense of partnership.”
What year did SSENSE start carrying these brands?
“For us, it really started in late 2020. So, you’re like, ‘Okay, this brand used to have ninety-eight percent sell-through,’ and they held out on it for so long and now they finally pick it up and I can’t sell a thing. Because if there’s any crossover in that buy, why would [a potential customer] buy it from me when they can buy it from [SSENSE] on seventy percent off? Or they do free shipping and returns, which small stores can’t afford to do. It really obliterates the industry that I claimed to support. It’s shocking that it’s allowed to carry on that way. If you’re overbuying to the point where you have to sell things for seventy percent off, you’re doing a bad job and now there’s too much product. It doesn’t feel exclusive anymore.”
Apart from independent brands, SOOP SOOP carried and produced a house line. What was the process of building that like?
“It was supposed to be really simple, basic, logo-less stuff that would fit into your wardrobe. Tee-shirts, sweatshirts, things that were ever so slightly elevated but super basic. No wacky colours, no outward branding. That came to me because I was taking sewing classes and the instructor was just starting their little production company. I’m pretty sure that I was one of her first clients, and then we kind of grew alongside each other. We’d been bootstrapping since the beginning—we didn’t have an investor and don’t come from wealthy families by any means. Every buck we made from [the house line] was put back in. For a long time, the house line was really backing all of the rest of it. But then that faltered when the pandemic hit because everyone was making sweats. It was like the perfect storm. But we might bring it back!”
Is that how things sort of came to an end?
“If I’m completely honest, and I think it’s important not to be shy about that stuff because I think it’s really easy to look in and be like, ‘Oh, those people must be killing it!’ or, ‘That looks like it’s relatively successful!’ and you just don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors. You don’t know that the people are going to work on Monday when they’re not supposed to so they can buy groceries for the week. This is what it got to. It’s so un-glam, but that was the reality. Certainly along the way I made a lot of bad decisions, but that was my first time having a store. Maybe if I had more experience and did it a second time around, I wouldn’t make those mistakes.”
What’s the future for SOOP SOOP?
“Immediately, we will still do books and magazines. I’m looking forward to trimming some of the fat from that. There are some titles I’ll keep carrying because I always had. Now that I have a lot less space to occupy, I really want to focus on heavy-hitters, get them out the door. We will keep that going online. I want to look for studio space so that I can have it all under one roof, because right now it’s between my apartment and Jordan’s apartment. Now we have the mini-magazine wall at 96 Tears who took over our space. That all came to be very organically. Will I get another store? Maybe. I think about it all the time. Every day I’m just like, ‘I need a space! I need a space so badly.’ You know, budget doesn’t allow for that right now but I also think I was on autopilot for the past twelve years and I want to make sure I take enough time to really think about what I want to do. I’m hoping to have something set up in the Spring. Even if it’s just a studio space and I’m doing distribution out of it. The other thing we fantasized about doing is the in-house brand—I get people DMing from all over being like, ‘I need a tight hoodie! I wore my sweatsuit to death and I need a replacement!’ I would love to be able to have that.”
You can find SOOP SOOP’s online store at www.soopsoop.ca
