Canada no longer in the Nood By Jennifer Giesbrecht February 6, 2012

The New Zealand furniture and design company Nood (New Objects of Desire) announced this month that it will close 4 of its Canadian stores by the end of March. The decision shocked many loyal BC and Alberta customers who, over the past 3-and-a-half years have come to know and love Nood for its reasonably priced replicas of mid-century designs like the Barcelona chair, Noguchi coffee table and Eames lounger. For two weeks, “Noodists” from Vancouver, Victoria and Calgary have been lining up for hours in hopes of snatching a replica Børge Mogensen, Eero Aarnio Ball chair or Nood’s signature slotted wood white stag trophy head for as much as 75% off. “The Victoria store was a MADHOUSE today!” wrote RedFlagDeals.com editor Amanda Aikman last weekend on the popular bargain-hunting website. “Why would they do this?” says Victoria Ronco, a loyal Nood customer who just found out about the store closure this Saturday during a routine shopping trip. Vancouver resident Ian Hursh says he was also quite surprised by the news. “It’s kind of a shame,” says Hursh, who says he enjoys buying Christmas gifts at the Gastown Nood, because his friends and family are always quite impressed with the items. Out in the cold Nood Canada’s nearly 100 employees were hit with the news in late December. Bethany Schultz, a keyholder at Nood’s Victoria location, says the staff was simply told that due to the economy, retail markets were struggling and the company’s single

investor New Zealand billionaire Jan Cameron had decided to cut ties. “We’re closing down gracefully,” says Damien Bryan, General Manger of Nood Canada, who confirms that the company was not yet in the red. Bryan says the root cause of the closures was that the company’s brand-based infrastructure was unable to cope with the recent global financial crisis. According to Bryan, the company originally intended to open a much larger coast-to-coast chain of Canadian stores, and they had already set up a broad and expensive network of Asian suppliers, designers and warehouses. Due to the economic downturn, however, expansion was halted after only four stores had opened. Then, after Cameron decided late last year to withdraw her financial support, it was quickly decided that the handful of Canadian couldn’t support the ambitious infrastructure. “We just needed more than the four stores we’ve got now to make it all make sense,” says Bryan. Not out of gas The news of the Nood store closures has not created much of a to-do in the rest of Gastown, Vancouver’s interior design hotspot. Rupert Grant, Design Consultant at the nearby 50-year-old Gastown mecca Inform Interiors says he knew from the start that Nood’s business model was unsound.

Customers  hunt  for  bargains  at  the  Gastown  Nood’s  closing  sale.  

Grant says that the Gastown design stores that thrive are not brand-based chains but the stores that sell top quality products for a price that honestly reflects the costs involved in creating them. He doubts that Nood took this approach to its products. “They were perpetually on sale!” he says. While Grant admits Nood carried some interesting original pieces such as Danish handmade children’s décor, he also suspects it was the “knockoffs” that did them in. “Herman Miller does not take kindly to this kind of stuff,” says Grant, referring to the various expensive legal battles that copycats of the office furniture icon have provoked in the past. Even younger design shops like 2009 newcomer Parliament have confidence that their higher-end independent business models have an edge over chain stores selling mass-produced replicas. “The problem with Nood was the quality,” says Parliament “minister” Sheila Alvari, who believes the replica market is just oversaturated with the same designs. Alvari says she is not worried about her own shop or others in the neighbourhood. “The other Gastown stores are just very high end,” she says, “and they’re very busy.” Bryan denied there were any legal battles with designers and stated that replica furniture pieces were their best sellers. “The Gastown store was a very profitable store,” he says, “that’s the shame about it.”

Farewell,  Canada!  Sold  items  are  stacked  high  in  the  Gastown  Nood’s  final  days.