New Store For Long Time Thunder Bay Based Company: Lowerys
by Scott A. Sumner
The name of Lowerys has been synonymous with office products in Northwestern Ontario for over 100 years now. Sam Lowery, great grandfather of the Christie family, founded this fourth generation business in 1905. Andrew Christie, grandfather, bought the business in the 1930’s. His son Brian Christie took over and 4 of his 5 children own and run the business today. They are Scott Christie, Sales Manager, Kim Christie, Furniture Manager; Andrew Christie who oversees the machine area and accounting and Shawn Christie who looks after the print area and helps in sales. The other Christie family member is Kevin Christie who is a chef at the Valhalla Inn at Runway 25. He was in Toronto for 25 years before just recently came back to Thunder Bay. “ We have an operational manager, Jason Gerry, who came on board about two years ago with the start of the new building project and one of his main jobs has been to help us get that done.” said Scott Christie.
Brian Christie still comes in 5 days a week to work at Lowerys with the same work ethic his father had. “ Brian started in the business when he was 10 and been at Lowerys for over 60 years. He knows a lot about the business and keeps us all under control and kind of dots the eyes and cross the tee’s.” said Kim Christie.
The fourth generation Christie family has worked at Lowerys for almost all their lives. Scott started working in the business at the age of 10. “ I would walk here after school and help out. I did deliveries as soon as I got my license but started full time when I was 22. Shawn started working here full time when he was 18. We all started in the warehouse, then moved into deliveries and then sales. We went door to door to do our sales then and still to this day it is the same way. We pride ourselves on our customer contact.” said Scott Christie.
Lowerys have been an iconic business over the years in NW Ontario. In 1993 the three brothers and sister got into it full time. A major competitor came in 1994 and required them to reorganize to compete and get prices the best possible. Today they offer some of the lowest pricing available.
“ We have grown our core products and expanded by acquisition. In 2000 we bought SRC Sheldon Reproduction, then Guide Printing, an office products operation in Kenora and became partners in Fort Frances with a company. We also partnered with Terry Law and set up CompuSmart that we have merged into Lowery’s. We now have a US division of our printing area called SBS, and bought Copycorp, which offered Konica Minolta copiers. We acquired Kakabeka Crystal 2 years ago and integrated it into our operation. It was a big learning curve at Kakabeka Crystal from getting it out of the ground to manufacturing the product and then distribution,” said Shawn Christie. “ Today we have 8 categories of operation: furniture, office supplies, printing, network, IT, copiers, janitorial/sanitation and water. We always wanted to be a one-stop supplier. By expanding our categories we have really tried hard to be able to supply customers with everything they need for the office right down to telephone systems.” Lowerys also have a partnership with MODO, an advertising company.
“ Over the last 5 years we have been developing our new office concept. Lowerys has been able to maintain our sales levels and expand but never have been a real retail destination with retail being just 5% of our business today. The new store will change that,” said Shawn Christie. “ There is a market to get into the retail market more so and have always wanted to do more retail. We have the products but just didn’t have the location. Our corporate customers may have to run out and get something right away and can now go out to an intercity location and get it from us.”
The new store is located just off Memorial Ave adjacent to the current location of their warehouse and printing operations. This new 2 storey building addition is coming together quickly and will be connected to the existing warehouse and print shop buildings. “ We will have a cafe called Scribbles, within the site specializing in coffee and lunch. A store with in a store. People today want more when they shop. If you have a short wait for our services you can stop, have free Wifi and a snack,” said Kim Christie. “ We are also building a big community boardroom with state of the art technology. Someone can rent or use our boardroom and then have it catered by Scribbles. We also want to offer the boardroom for charities. There will be seminars to learn about new products or ergonomics. People aren’t always comfortable with their work stations and will be able to learn more about ergonomics in our seminars.”
The footprint of the new building is 10,000 square feet per floor, with print at 6000 and the warehouse at 10,000 for a total of area of 36,000. The Lowerys furniture warehouse will be still located at Russell Street in another building owned by the company.
“ The IT in the new store area will be very contemporary with 4-46 inch TV’s set up to run as one with streaming movies and demonstrating how you can interact with your devices. We want Lowerys to be a learning facility where we can put on classes in different areas such as digital camera or even have a 55 plus night. The technology of today can be scary and we want to help people get educated in the products.” said Kim Christie.
Lowerys have hired about 20 new people so far who are in training and will ramp up to close to about 120 staff in total when the new location is open, expected to be in mid January. “ We used to have been so hands on earlier. On the weekends we would be doing furniture installation. Our background was to be was lean and mean, but today we have many more employees to help serve our customers. We pride ourselves on our service to local clients.” said Scott Christie. “ Our new store took 5 years to develop because our day to day work takes a lot of our time. We felt the timing was right with the potential mining boom on the horizon and want to be ready for that. We enjoy the business and sometimes all we think about 7 days a week is what goes on here. We want to have some different offerings at Lowerys than anyone else in Thunder Bay or maybe the country- some really interesting things with a cool look. It will be a unique shopping experience.”
