Princess Auto opens two new locations in Canada

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This article was published 19/02/2015 (3970 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PRINCESS Auto has never been a company that cared much about the retailing trends of the day, so the fact it is opening new stores while chains called Target, Mexx and Smart Set are closing may not be too surprising.

The Winnipeg-based specialty-hardware chain opened two stores this week in Markham, Ont. and Medicine Hat, Alta. And there are at least two more openings planned this year.

Not only is Princess Auto bucking the trend of other bricks-and-mortar retailers who are closing stores or going out of business, it’s also the first new store openings for the chain since it opened a store in St. John’s a couple of years ago.

“This is something the company has been planning for a while,” said Rob Shields, Princess Auto’s senior vice-president of retail operations and marketing. “We found that we had quite a bit of demand coming from these two locations… people who live there were driving to one of our other stores, either to Calgary or to our Scarborough or Newmarket stores.”

And although part of the draw of Princess Auto’s stores is the hands-on nature of some of its unique product offerings, it has also built up a strong on-line and mail-order business. Shields said there is a lot of that type of traffic coming into the Markham and Medicine Hat markets.

“The third thing was the customer research,” he said. “There was demand in the market for our merchandise.”

Welders, mechanics and do-it-yourselfers shop at Princess Auto. For example, you can buy all the parts needed to build your own trailer — the running gear, the hitches and the wheels. You can also find just about every variety of air compressor, portable heaters and all sorts of unusual parts and tools not found at Rona or Part Source.

These are the 37th and 38th stores in the 63-year-old business owned by the Bob Tallman family.

Maureen Atkinson, senior partner of the retail consultants J.C. Williams group, said the careful growth strategy Princess Auto deploys is a good one.

“Quite frankly, doing a little at a time rather than having these very ambitious store-opening plans is probably much better than the way some other stores do it,” she said.

The combination of the quirky nature of some of the product offerings — which beg for knowledgable customer- service reps — and the loyalty of the customer base means Princess Auto store locations probably won’t ever yield completely to online shopping

“From what I understand, they have a devoted customer base and they cater to that,” Atkinson said. “And what they differentiate on is knowledge and service.”

So, irrespective of the price of oil or the availability of space in the mall, this was the right time for expansion.

“We have been growing successfully for the past number of years without opening stores,” Shields said. “We’ve done lots of work on our customer base, and realized through our dot-com and mail order and just straight-up customer demand that we can open some new stores and be successful.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca