These are the people in your neighborhood....

We can’t believe that September is less than a week away! It feels like we JUST moved to our new location and here we are, over three months in our new home here in Corktown.

It’s been a busy three months too. Aside from the store renovations, we’ve been getting to know our new Corktown neighbors and introducing the neighborhood to Ethel.  We’re meeting lots of new customers that are so happy we made the move closer to downtown and a lot of our customers from Leslieville have dropped in to say “hi” and to tell us how much we’re missed in the old ‘hood.

We’ve seen a few new funky indie boutiques open up around us, like Even & Odd and Far Away Eyes. 

Even & Odd, at 356 Queen St. East (right next door to RedLine Coffee), carries a wide range of products, including decorative pillows, French made glassware, natural wood trim mirrors, custom salvage wood furniture, and carefully selected vintage pieces. Their overall aesthetic has a great rustic, industrial chic vibe which we think would appeal to the shabby chic set. You can check out their website here. http://evenandodd.ca/site/

Far Away Eyes, at 295 Queen St. East (right next door to Ontario Paint & Wallpaper), is a elegant little shop just opened by Katelyn Joliat, a local jewellery designer. Her shop features her line of jewellery, K8, as well as a carefully curated collection of tees by Adieu and No Lost Witches, as well as jeans by Courtshop. Along with these clothing lines, she also has vegan friendly candles by Modern Alchemy and all natural lotions by Toronto’s own Ella’s Botanicals. Far Away Eyes is a softer version of steampunk and we’re thinking we may just have to indulge in one of Katelyn’s bow shaped pendants from her K8 collection. Check out their website here. http://www.shopfarawayeyes.com/

Here at Ethel, we’ve also seen lots of furniture come and go, and we still have a few store projects to finish, like our custom light raft which we’ll use to suspend vintage lighting from. We also want to build a half wall in the back to allow us to have a more private work space when we’re working on client projects and even just to hide some of our messier furniture clean-up projects if we don’t have time to finish them.

We’re also thinking about the upcoming few months too, as we’re focussing on bringing in some new product lines that we think our customers will like. We have a collection of tiki mugs from TikiFarm coming in this week and we’re looking at at some tooled leather goods made by a local designer that we think our rockabilly customers will love. 

We’re also thinking of architecture and design related things, like vintage building toys, modern viewmasters and design books for kids.

Ethel will always be about vintage modern design but we don’t want to limit ourselves just to Danish Teak and Herman Miller shell chairs. Since there are so many talented people designing great stuff today, we'd be silly to stick our head in the sand! Over the next few months, we’ll be working on growing our business and hopefully our customer base too.

We hope you’ll agree that a little 21^st century product in the store will be like a splash of soda in a glass of old scotch, or a vintage bangle bracelet with that brand new little black dress.

See you at the store!