A rapidly growing Montreal menswear line, featuring affordable, on-trend threads for discerning millennials, opens its newly expanded Gastown location this weekend.
Frank & Oak – founded by high school pals and East Coasters Ethan Song and Hicham Ratnan – started as digital-first store, but has moved beyond the Internet to open the doors to a whopping 13 brick-and-mortar retail shops in just 18 months. The latest Vancouver location caps off nine other storefronts in Canada and three recently opened US stores in Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC. The partners started their online store in 2012, which is comprised almost entirely of their house brand, creating a digital space that not only enabled men to make purchases, but also helped them pull together complete looks with online style advisors.
“I think men are not as savvy about what are the latest trends, they don’t really follow fashion blogs or magazines,”Song explains, noting their typical customer is a 25- to 35-year-old male in the creative field (kinda sounds like half of Gastown). “The one finding that is kind of interesting is that a lot of men go shopping with their girlfriends and listen to their girlfriend’s advice, so we realized, on top of just selling products, providing that advice was of very high value to our customers.”
After launching the digital brand, the partners realized there was a need to have physical storefronts that clients could visit.
“I don’t know if we expected that we were very interested in leveraging online to reach our customer, [but] over time we realized our customers did need that kind of personalized service,” Song says, explaining the need for the brick-and-mortar expansion. “We realized that our brand was important enough that people would travel to see us.”
The new 2,400 square-foot Vancouver space, a larger footprint than the previous store, will also house a full-service barber shop and juice bar helmed by the team at local juice emporium Krokodile Pear.
“Our space was designed to feel more like a community space than a store, so it’s very lounge-y; a lot of space dedicated to people hanging out,” says Song, who has a connection with Vancouver, having studied computer engineering at UBC and previously living on the West Coast for seven years.
“Vancouver has a very special place in my heart,” he says. “With the space in Gastown, on Cordova, our goal was basically to bring a bit of that Montreal’s modern aesthetic and combine it with what I always perceived as being really interesting about the Pacific Northwest.”
