[URBAN NOTE] "Fetish-wear business thrives by finding a niche outside the mainstream"
Jacob Serebrin's article in The Globe and Mail about Northbound Leather tells a fascinating story, about how a local company can, by catering to a specialty audience, thriving while staying local.
Jane Jacobs would be proud.
For Toronto’s Northbound Leather, getting into the fetish-wear market started by being in the right place at the right time.
It happened “by virtue of the fact that we were located at ground zero of what was Toronto’s emerging gay culture in the ’70s,” says George Giaouris, the owner of the leather and fetish apparel retailer and manufacturer.
This year, Mr. Giaouris is celebrating his business’s 30th anniversary, but it’s really just a celebration of the current incarnation and name of the family business that got its start in Greece in 1961. Mr. Giaouris’s father was making metal closures for small leather goods when he saw an opportunity to expand into making the whole product - things like leather handbags, briefcases and globes.
A few years later, the family moved to Canada and, by 1970, the business had settled on Toronto’s Yonge Street. It was there that the store, which had started catering to hippies, found it was getting interest from a new market.
And so it began to cater to a new market: alongside the leather jackets Northbound makes and sells appeared items like leather pants, shirts, chaps and corsets. Other products, like restraints and the category euphemistically referred to as “percussion” are aimed uniquely at a kinkier customer.
“We were taken by the hand and led down the Yellow Brick Road,” Mr. Giaouris says. But that didn’t present a problem for the family business. “We were a very liberal family, very non-judgmental.”
Jane Jacobs would be proud.
For Toronto’s Northbound Leather, getting into the fetish-wear market started by being in the right place at the right time.
It happened “by virtue of the fact that we were located at ground zero of what was Toronto’s emerging gay culture in the ’70s,” says George Giaouris, the owner of the leather and fetish apparel retailer and manufacturer.
This year, Mr. Giaouris is celebrating his business’s 30th anniversary, but it’s really just a celebration of the current incarnation and name of the family business that got its start in Greece in 1961. Mr. Giaouris’s father was making metal closures for small leather goods when he saw an opportunity to expand into making the whole product - things like leather handbags, briefcases and globes.
A few years later, the family moved to Canada and, by 1970, the business had settled on Toronto’s Yonge Street. It was there that the store, which had started catering to hippies, found it was getting interest from a new market.
And so it began to cater to a new market: alongside the leather jackets Northbound makes and sells appeared items like leather pants, shirts, chaps and corsets. Other products, like restraints and the category euphemistically referred to as “percussion” are aimed uniquely at a kinkier customer.
“We were taken by the hand and led down the Yellow Brick Road,” Mr. Giaouris says. But that didn’t present a problem for the family business. “We were a very liberal family, very non-judgmental.”