This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Valerie Crisp, the 38-year-old founder of Common Goods, an online Canadian marketplace. She is based in Toronto. Her words have been edited for length and clarity.
The Buy Canadian movement certainly ebbs and flows. But right now I’m blown away by the way Canadians have taken this on as a group project.
Last year, when US President Donald Trump implemented his tariff policy, conversations about solidarity and sovereignty in Canada were swelling, and it became apparent to me that this probably wasn’t going to be a temporary conversation.
I’d been working on a pilot project for a product search solution when the Buy Canada movement started. Having this prototype already for product search in my back pocket, I thought, why don’t we see if Canadians would want this solution?
Supporting Canadian businesses is always preferred, but I think there’s nuance to this conversation that I’ve become more aware of since founding this business.
I saw a chance to make buying Canadian easier
My background is in fashion and apparel. I was a founder before with my own bag brand, but by the time the tariff situation arose, I’d already gone through a tech accelerator program. I really wanted to help customers find the products they were searching for in an easier and more convenient way, so I developed a pilot project for a product search solution.
After I realized I could pivot this to be a Canadian goods marketplace, I put up a TikTok about my idea. I had no big following. I just think I had the right message at the right time because people showed some interest, and we got an email signup list going.
I’ve always thought the Canadian retail space especially deserved better, and it was a matter of initiative to help people find these brands without having to really search for them. American stuff has slowly become the default, and there are so many great Canadian brands. So, I thought, why can’t I be the one to highlight them?
Launching a Buy Canada marketplace
I put up the landing page last February, and at first, we used an affiliate model, promoting Canadian brands through their existing affiliate partnership programs, so customers would have to check out on their website.
In November, we introduced curated gift boxes filled with Canadian products, which gave customers an easy way to buy directly from us for the holidays. They did really well, and that’s when we started gaining momentum and bringing more brands onto direct checkout.
We’ve kept a couple of our top-performing products as affiliate listings just because they’re bigger brands that maybe don’t want to bring on a new distribution channel yet.
We also publish Buy Canadian guides to help shoppers shop Canadian. There are a lot of bigger brands that aren’t the right fit for our website, but we offer a top 10 list and a top 20 list for those types of products. Those are affiliate links, regardless of what the brand is, whether they’re stocked on Common Goods or elsewhere.
Apparel, personal care items, tea, and coffee are among our bestselling products. A lot of our recent customers have been new, so I think they’re sticking with products they know they’ll actually use, like soap and toiletries.
I learned that buying Canadian comes with tradeoffs
I’ve been prioritizing buying Canadian products myself for a while, but with the caveat that I’m very, very aware of how many things aren’t entirely made in Canada. It depends on how you want to define buying Canadian. Is it buying from a Canadian business, or is it buying a product that is wholly made here? Finding a product made in Canada is more viable for food or skincare. It’s much more challenging for electronics.
Most Canadians prefer something made in Canada, but the rubber really hits the road once they see the options; sometimes there aren’t any Canadian options, or the Canadian option costs twice as much. That’s not really a democratic offering, making it a bit of a privilege to shop only Canadian.
That’s why my website is all about Canadian businesses, and from there, customers can filter by what’s important to them.
When the tariff deal fell apart, my small business started gaining traction
I’m the only full-time person working on this, and we’ve always been a small business. We don’t have any outside funding, so I’ve built this slowly and steadily over the last year, driven by the public interest, not by outside funding, venture capital, or anything like that.
The morning after our Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, announced no deal, I saw the conversation heating back up in my algorithm. I put out one or two Threads posts on the topic, and those got a lot of traction because people were looking for ways to shop Canadian or buy Canadian.
We don’t have a huge following, but I think that our strength is being at the right place at the right time and putting ourselves into the conversation. In one day, our daily site traffic went from under 5,000 visitors to almost 15,000.
I’m thrilled for our brands. I had one brand write me an email to say, “Hey, I’ve gotten so many orders from you guys in the last 24 hours. I will need to check that they’re not fraudulent because this seems nuts.” And I had to reply, “No, no, this is correct. They’re all real orders.”
Our returning customer rate is anywhere between five and 13%. We’d love to get it up to 20%, but for a lot of customers, they’ve only heard about us in the last six months. So it’s a bit too early, I think, to measure that.
The overwhelming feeling is that buying Canadian is a nationwide group project, and people are excited to put their money where their hearts are.
It’s good to see this conversation wake more people up to where they’re buying from
I think it’s been really interesting to see the conversation evolve to one that’s a bit more nuanced. Canadians have become overall way more mindful about where their money goes. I have. It’s been heartening to see.
Now, Canadians are saying, “Actually, we want the default to be Canadian.” We want to be masters of our own destiny and make our choices from there. That more nuanced conversation can bring business to Canadian companies trying to make a go of it.
Would you like to share your response to the US-Canadian tariff policy? If so, reach out to this reporter at [email protected].
