Unicorn. 5135 Boulevard St. Laurent, Montréal, Québec. +1 514 544 2828
Once upon a time, people designed and made stuff with their own hands. Merchants sold the work of artisans in their local shops. Anyone could purchase and own a little piece of cultural history from a place and its people; ensuring the town’s prosperity and future. Simple, huh? An enduring model for retail success. So you’d think. But today, shops like this are a rare and unique find. A unicorn, one might say.
Cocoa Locale. 4807 Avenue du Parc, Montreal, Québec.
Cocoa Locale is no cupcake shop. It’s not a bakery that churns things out for other businesses. Nor is it a cafe. It’s a “home kitchen”: a single room with an oven and a display case. There’s just one woman behind the counter who bakes and sells the goods herself, right there in front of you. Cocoa Locale’s friendly, feisty sole proprietor, Reema Singh, knew exactly what she was doing when she opened her shop 5 years ago. She wanted to create something small and local, where the folks who came in would make her and her cake shop part of their daily lives.
Shakespeare and Company. 37 rue de la Bucherie, 75005, Paris
Let me tell you a story. A perfectly circular one, shaped by fate. There once was an American woman called Sylvia Beach. She was studying literature in Paris when she fell in love with Adrienne, a French bookshop owner. Sylvia set up her own English language bookshop, across the road from Adrienne’s, on the Left Bank. She named it Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia’s enthusiasm for books and authors meant that her shop became home base for writers and poets passing through Paris. Some were rather famous, with names like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Gide, Stein, Beckett and Lawrence. Many became her friends and protégés; she championed, fed and housed those whom she could. For a writer called James Joyce, Sylvia really outdid herself. She published the first edition of Ulysses, at her own great expense, when no one else would.
