Perfect fit Evolving from an online side-hustle, Clothing Bakery now calls Exchange District space home By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, May. 11, 2024

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This article was published 11/05/2024 (837 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After six years, Clothing Bakery finally has a place to call home.

That was owner Carjelu Delera’s sentiment on May 4, when the latest version of his vintage apparel-and-accessories shop held a grand-opening sale at 105-70 Arthur St. The well-attended event saw eager beavers lined up around the block, 45 minutes before a scheduled 11 a.m. kick-off.

“I think I got two hours sleep last night, tops,” Delera said that morning, standing in the centre of his 1,500-square-foot premises, an attractive space boasting floor-to-ceiling windows and exposed brick walls jam-packed with a wide array of pre-worn attire, such as band T-shirts, sports jerseys and NASCAR jackets. Oh, and a life-size cardboard standup of Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan.

“You always worry if anybody is going to show up or not, except when we looked outside at 10:30 (a.m.) and saw all these people waiting to get in, we started to worry that there wasn’t going to be enough room for everybody.”

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Delera moved to Winnipeg from the Philippines in 2008, at age 13. He laughingly recalls the family meeting his mother and father called, to let him and his three sisters know they’d be packing their bags for the Great White North, where relatives of theirs were already living.

Their dad showed them photos of snow-covered mountain peaks and antlered beasts, commenting it was where they were headed, he remembers, sporting jeans, a white top and a fashionable Carhartt work jacket, the latter of which he borrowed from one of his displays, earlier in the day.

“Let’s just say we were a little surprised when we got to Winnipeg and not only weren’t there any mountains, there weren’t any reindeer or moose roaming the streets, either.” (First it got cold, then it got old, is how he sums up his first experience with a good old-fashioned Prairie winter.)

Since both of his parents are engineers, he was expected to follow in their footsteps once he’d graduated from Maples Collegiate. He did just that, spending two years at Red River College Polytechnic studying civil engineering. That didn’t turn out to be his “thing,” however, so he switched gears and enrolled in a medical radiologic technology course, with the goal of becoming an X-ray technician.

“The deal is, it’s hard to make money for going out and stuff when you’re in school full-time, so in 2018, a few high-school buddies and I started tossing around ideas how to make some extra cash,” he says.

The plan they ultimately came up with involved sorting through their individual closets and selling garments they’d outgrown or no longer had any use for, mostly sweatshirts and hoodies, via Instagram. They named their fledgling venture Clothing Bakery at Delera’s suggestion, a nod to a shuttered Graham Avenue locale he used to frequent called the Urban Bakery, which had specialized in streetwear.

Delera’s buddies largely moved on after that initial sell-off, only he enjoyed the process so much he began to frequent thrift stores and secondhand outlets throughout the city, in search of desirable items to peddle. Not only that; he also halted the medical classes he’d been taking in favour of a one-year business administration course offered at Herzing College, having decided marketing and merchandising was his true calling.

It sounds funny to say, he admits, but COVID benefitted Clothing Bakery tremendously. With everybody stuck at home for weeks on end, people began sifting through their wardrobes, trying to decide what to keep and what to part with. He says he was only too happy to take their discards off their hands for a fee, when they reached out to see if he was interested.

Delera was still running Clothing Bakery as an online entity in the fall of 2022 when he checked out a pop-up sale in the Exchange District run by Ed Yhuda Tcherni, a Winnipegger who produced his own line of jeans, Shagal Jeans, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Tcherni had resurrected Shagal Jeans ahead of the holiday season to sell never-worn stock that had been squirreled away for almost 30 years. As the two men got to talking, Tcherni mentioned he had a vacancy in a nearby building he owned, in the event Delera, who was also renting two racks at the Collab Shop on Albert Street, ever desired a physical location of his own.

By then, Delera had a business partner, Juan Pocholo Barachina, whom he’d met when Barachina was running Torn Patches, a similar operation to his. The pair took Tcherni up on his offer and moved into a 600-square-foot space at 80 King St., in January 2023. It didn’t take them long to realize they required more room than that, however. That led them to their new home on the main floor of the seven-storey Whitla Building, directly across the hall from Más Coffee Co.

Like the previous site, selections at the Clothing Bakery are sorted first by style, then by colour. New features include a lounging area if you’re waiting on somebody who’s trying things on plus an entire wing devoted to what Delera refers to as “hometown heroes.” There you’ll find Jets gear, Blue Bombers paraphernalia, Goldeyes pennants… even a Winnipeg Thunder warm-up jacket.

“We’ll also be doing weekly drops,” he says. “This week it’s workwear, as lots of people around my age are heavily into that, but another week it might be knit sweaters. Or hockey jerseys. Or outerwear; we have a ton of ideas.”

Delera, who often travels to Minneapolis and Toronto to source fresh stock, says his customer base runs the gamut from 20-somethings looking for anything-Taylor Swift (he currently has a concert T-shirt of hers from a show she co-headlined with Justin Bieber in 2012) to parents looking for deals for their high-school-age kids. His coolest interaction so far? A fellow in his 80s who dropped by the King Street location and later invited him and Barachina to his house, to poke through decades-old rock T-shirts he was hoping to unload.

“What he didn’t tell us was that he was this huge Rolling Stones collector, who had an entire room devoted to the group,” Delera says, his eyes widening. “We were able to buy some of his doubles and triples, but that barely put a dent in what he had.”

The Clothing Bakery is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday, while Mondays are reserved for something they don’t teach you in business school, Delera says with a wink.

“That’s laundry day, for all the new arrivals. I never went near a washer and dryer when I was younger — my mom took care of everything for me when I was going to school — but I’ve since gotten pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.”

For more information, go to instagram.com/clothingbakery

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca