Retail Trust Issues
Kotn, The Mile-End, and Gentrification
In previous issues of this newsletter, I’ve explored home-grown phenomena whose organic proliferation on the streets of Montreal caught my eye. This week is different.
Kotn was founded in Toronto in 2015. Their tagline is “affordable, ethical basics” and their website uses a very chic serif font. In the Fall of 2019, they opened a retail store in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, right on the corner of Clark and St. Viateur. They market themselves via an armada of social media ads, which is how I discovered them.
If you are like me, the previous paragraph created a deep and instant distrust of this brand. You already hate this brand for its contribution to the gentrification of the Mile End. Does this historically artsy1 neighborhood need more of les autres coming in with their $35 CAD crewneck tees and overly-polished shopfronts? How dare they, honestly?
After all, the Mile End has been burned by ethical basics brands before. Frank and Oak, founded in 2014, is just a bit closer to the Ubisoft building. Also an ethical basics brand with a cool website2, it was just earlier this year that Frank and Oak got themselves in trouble by selling a T-shirt featuring the iconic facade of Dragon Flowers, a fellow Mile End business. Despite using the shop’s storefront, Dragon Flowers received no monetary benefit from the tee, and their private pleas for Frank and Oak to stop selling the tee went ignored. Thus they turned to Instagram to rile up some community rage.
Like Frank and Oak, Kotn is a “Certified Benefit Corporation”, which means that they’ve undergone a third-party audit focused on sustainability, social benefit, and accountability and have included commitments to these topics in their articles of incorporation. Basically, Frank and Oak’s above snafu now angers their stakeholders and not just Instagram.3
Kotn provides a “farm-to-store” approach to clothing, working directly with and subsidizing Egyptian cotton farmers in a bid to increase the transparency of supply chains, which are typically murky if not outright horrifying4. Kotn’s goal of investing in Egyptian cotton communities extends to the youth: they’ve been working with an NGO to open Montessori-style schools for the children of cotton farmers who otherwise might not have access to education. They even make adorable Instagram carousels about sustainable shopping:
Considering all of that, $35 CAD for a tee seems pretty reasonable. And given that your stereotypical Mile Ender is an avid thrift-shopper and DIY enthusiast, Kotn’s sustainable fashion seems right up their alley.
But it seems unlikely to me that Kotn could become a neighborhood staple, even if does “fit” the neighborhood. There’s simply too much polish. As we’ve covered here, grime is essential for acceptance in Montreal. And if not grime, a sense of humility and homeliness must pervade the enterprise. The Kotn store gets good foot traffic; people clearly seem to like it. But if the store was hit with a massive rent hike tomorrow, or even in ten years, I don’t at all believe that people would clamor to save it the way they did for S.W. Welch. “The grime” is the difference here. Kotn’s owners are featured in the 2018 Forbes 30 under 30. S.W. Welch is owned and operated by Mr. Steven Welch. That makes a difference in this town. So while I was perhaps too quick to judge Kotn, I still feel that my reservations were valid. They’re doing good things, sure, but I’m not convinced that makes them exempt from the label of “gentrifier”. To ease the retail trust issues that pervade Mile Enders, we’re going to need more dirt.
For the uninitiated: Grimes, Arcade Fire, and many more lived in the Mile End.
There are even film photos!
Notable “B corps” include Patagonia and everyone’s second and third favorite Vermonters, Ben & Jerry.
Perhaps the cotton in your shirt was picked by Uzbek children, or Uighurs forcibly detained in Xinjiang?