BiWay's $10 concept store in Toronto might be cancelled after years of hype
Hyped up since its reveal a few years ago, the return of the beloved Canadian discount chain BiWay is looking like it probably won't happen after all.
BiWay disappeared from the retail landscape when it shuttered its last 250 stores in 2001. The plan to bring back the brand with a concept one-price-for-all business model has been generating buzz since announced in 2018.
But now it looks like the store could never see the light of day.
Resurrecting a brand that lived on in the hearts and memories of 1990s kids, the concept store that planned to price every item at $10 was initially planned to open in August of 2019. This date passed with no opening.
Next, the brand's original nonagenarian founder Mal Coven announced that the all-$10-everything BiWay was set to open within a 15,000-square-foot location at Orfus and Dufflaw Roads in August of 2020. Once again, the date came and went with no store being opened.
The plan to bring back the long-missed brand faced an unfortunate hurdle just a couple of months after its planned reopening, when Coven passed away in October 2020, at the age of 91.
In the wake of his passing, opening plans were pushed back to November of 2020. With the brand's founder no longer in the pilot seat, this goal would not be met.
BiWay's Instagram account posted on Thursday, the one-year anniversary of Coven's passing, that the store opening has not only been postponed yet again, but possibly cancelled entirely.
BiWay's resurrection was Coven's passion project, the company stating that "without him, there is no else to plan the opening out and no else to get the store opened. We regret saying this, but he was the brains behind the reopening and it's nothing without him."
It looks like we may have reached the end of this brief second chapter in BiWay's story, but the statement's wording has undoubtedly left the door open for future attempts at restarting the brand.
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