Emma Reid started EmmaVancouver in 2016. Before that she spent twenty two years deciding which sizes a store would carry.

The afternoon that ended it

In March of 2015 I was standing at the back of a store in Burnaby with a clipboard in my hand. A woman about my age was looking at a navy dress on the mannequin, and she asked the young man on the floor whether it came in her size.

He told her it was not really made for their customer.

She said thank you and she left, and she was very polite about it. That is the part I still think about. She was polite about it, because she had heard it before.

I was the buyer. Style 4470. I had ordered nine hundred of them in small, medium and large, because I had asked for the larger sizes in a meeting the previous October and I had lost. So the sentence that young man said to her was not his sentence. It was mine. He was twenty three years old and he was reading out a decision I made in a boardroom in October.

I was forty seven. I sat in my car in that parking lot for a long time before I drove anywhere.

What I had wrong

For twenty two years I believed I was choosing what women wanted.

I was not. I was choosing what was safe to be wrong about. A size that sells through in nine weeks is a safe decision. A size that sits until January is a mistake with your name on it. So the range gets shorter every year, and nobody ever writes down why, and after enough years there is a whole group of women who walk into a store and quietly understand that the store is not for them.

Nobody ever says it to you directly. That is what makes it so effective. You are simply not stocked.

I want to be honest about my part in it. I did not inherit that system. I ran it, and I was good at it, and I was rewarded for it.

What EmmaVancouver is

I started this in 2016, here in Canada, and it is small on purpose.

There is no store you can walk into. There is no buying committee. There is no October meeting. It is me, a very small team, and a supplier list I have spent years getting right, and we sell directly to you so that there is no chain in the middle deciding who counts as a customer.

Everything here is chosen for a woman who is somewhere between forty five and seventy, who is not dressing to look like anyone else, and who has spent long enough being sold to that she can hear it coming.

How we choose what goes on this site

One rule sits above all the others.

If a style is only offered to us in three sizes, we do not take it. It has to come in the full range, small through 5XL, or it does not go on the site at all. I have turned down pieces I loved because of this. I will keep turning them down, because the alternative is a woman standing in front of a screen finding out that the only thing wrong with her is that she is not convenient to stock.

After that the questions are simple and I ask them in this order. Does it hold its shape when you sit down in it. Does it work with the shoes you already own. Is it comfortable enough that you forget about it by the middle of the day. Would I put it on to see people I have not seen in a while.

If the answer to the last one is no, it does not matter how good the margin is.

Four words you will not read on this site

Flattering. It means hiding.

Slimming. The same word, wearing a coat.

For your age. There is nothing in this sentence except the judgment at the end of it.

Still. As in still looking wonderful. Take the still out and it becomes a compliment.

We write about colour, cut, length, weight and comfort. We do not write about what a piece of clothing is supposed to be making up for.

What the women who shop here say

More than 3,400 Canadian women have rated us 4.7 out of 5 stars.

I am not going to summarize what they said, because a founder telling you what her customers think is not evidence of anything. Their words are on the product pages, including the ones who told us the V sits lower than they expected and the ones who ordered a size down out of habit and had to send it back. Those are on there too. Read those first.

The promises, in plain language

Free shipping on every order across Canada.

Thirty days to change your mind, for any reason, including no reason. If it does not work, tell us and we will make it right.

A real person answers the email, and most of the time that person is me. You can reach us at support@emmavancouver.com.

Prices in Canadian dollars. No surprise duties at the door.

Where we are

North Vancouver, British Columbia. Canadian owned and independently run since 2016.

If you have read this far and you are wondering whether the thing you are looking at comes in your size, it does. That was the whole point.

Emma
Founder, EmmaVancouver