Icebreaker, the New Zealand merino wool apparel company, announced that March 23 will mark the grand opening for its first Icebreaker TouchLab store in Western Canada.
The 1,800-square-foot store will be located in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the Kitsilano neighborhood at 2089 West 4th Avenue, near the corner of Arbutus. Icebreaker has one other TouchLab store in Canada at 1515 rue Ste-Catherine Ouest in Montréal, Quebec.
New Zealand is over 12,000 kilometers from Vancouver, so the Icebreaker team has brought the Southern Alps and the merino sheep to Western Canada through imagery in the store. Customers can see images of New Zealand, and through the company's Baacode traceability program, meet the farmers tended the flocks that grew the fiber in the apparel.
The TouchLab will feature an area where shoppers can dip their hands into raw merino.
“More and more Vancouverites will soon discover Icebreaker's miracle fibre from New Zealand,” said Jeremy Moon, Icebreaker's founder and CEO. “We think it will be love at first touch.”
The company said the Kitsilano neighborhood is home to a high concentration of healthy, fit shoppers that match Icebreaker's target demographic. These shoppers are known for being early adopters and setting trends. Icebreaker was also attracted to the neighborhood by the concentration of other lifestyle retailers with stores in the area, including The North Face, Roots and Lululemon. Several Vancouver area specialty retailers, including Eco Outdoor Sports, Skiis and Biikes, Sigge's Sports Villa, Strub Sports, Atmosphere Sports, On the Rivet, Europe Bound and Australian Boot Company, currently sell Icebreaker. Icebreaker expects the move to improve overall brand awareness for them as well.
Icebreaker Design is working with local architects from Vancouver Nick Sully from SHAPE Architecture, for the Kitsilano TouchLab. The store will be the company's seventh TouchLab in the world. In North America, in addition to the TouchLab store in Montréal, Quebec, the company has a store in Portland, Oregon. It opened its first flagship TouchLab store in New York City in December 2010.
