How family businesses adapt to change while honouring their roots

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Charles Goldfinger, co-founder of Toronto-based clothing manufacturer Canada Sportswear, immigrated to Canada in 1948. Born in Poland, Goldfinger was living in a displaced persons camp in Austria after World War Two and was scouted to join a sponsorship program bringing tailors to Canada.

”He [had] nothing in his pocket, and it’s: ‘I’ve got to put food on the table, and what am I going to do?’” says Charles’s son, Ralph Goldfinger. “That’s how Canada sportswear was created.”

This year marks Canada Sportswear’s 70th anniversary. Today, Ralph is the CEO of the company’s Apparel Division; after spending his high-school weekends at Canada Sportswear, Ralph has already racked up 40 years of company experience.

Manufacturing outerwear basics from hoodies and T-shirts to workwear, Canada Sportswear is a B2B wholesaler. With around two million units of clothing in stock, the company handles hundreds of orders a day, with orders varying from a sample of one garment to 10,000 units.

Scott Pearce, Canada Sportswear’s director of sales, says that the company is gaining around 30 new customers a month, driving a 25 per cent growth rate. Ralph credits this growth to the company’s use of new technology, including switching to e-commerce, away from a sales system that was “too antiquated and slow,” says Pearce.

With a Cloud-based retail platform, clients can purchase items whenever they want, rather than Canada Sportswear receiving an invoice, tabulating it with payables, and being issued a hard-copy check, Ralph says. “It’s almost like an old company has rejuvenated and become a new company, even though we’re 70 years old,” he adds.

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As well as this, Canada Sportswear is in the process of upgrading its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, used for day-to-day business activities from accounting to supply-chain management. By integrating their future ERP with their Cloud-based retail platform, “it [will] allow orders to flow through on their own, without having to be touched a second time,” says Emily Castrillo, customer service manager.

Castrillo also runs the company’s marketing efforts and has recently started using AI to create voice-overs for social media posts. The team also leverages more traditional marketing tactics, including attending multiple trade shows a year, putting ads in trade publications, and printing a catalog. “There are a number of older customers that’ll come up and go, ‘oh thank God, you still print,’” Pearce says.

Canada Sportswear recently expanded into headwear. “It’s a great feeling, being part of a winning team, as opposed to grinding for cost,” says Ralph.

Family businesses like Canada Sportswear generate 48.9 per cent of Canada’s private sector GDP, and have been shown to generate significantly higher returns for shareholders and survive for longer than non-family-owned businesses.

Another family-run business, Moe’s Home Collection, is a Vancouver-based furniture wholesaler, working with designers to create unique pieces. Launched in 1999 by Moe Samieian Sr., Moe’s two children – Sara and Moe Jr. – joined part-time after graduating high school that same year.

Today, Sara and Moe Jr. are co-CEOs of Moe’s Home Collection. Sara says that, since 2010, the company has seen exponential growth year over year; in Canada, its major clients include Wayfair, Hudson’s Bay and Simon’s.

“We’ve built all of our integrations with Wayfair,” Sara says. “All of our product feeds, pricing, inventory – all of that is all automated and synced with Wayfair.” She adds that the company gets hundreds of reviews on Wayfair, which the team runs through an open-source AI to generate a summary of areas it can improve on.

Building off the success of Moe’s Home Collection, Sara and Moe Jr. launched their own direct-to-consumer furniture company, Sundays, in 2019, alongside Moe Jr.’s wife Barbora Samieian, and their friend Noah Morse. Despite initially planning to stay digital-only on their e-commerce platform, Sara and Moe Jr. took a chance on a physical store in Vancouver.

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“It really proved to be successful, and we’ve been opening more and more stores over the last two years,” Sara says. Today, Sundays has storefronts in Calgary, Toronto, Seattle and Los Angeles. The locations were selected through careful furniture-industry research conducted by a data company, Sara says, helping the team pinpoint cities with high customer demand.

Despite this, most of Sundays’ sales happen online. “The store is for the customer to get a sense of the quality and the materials,” Sara says. “That’s all they need, and then they’re more comfortable to buy online.”

As well as having physical stores across North America, Moe’s Home Collection has permanent showrooms in Las Vegas and High Point in North Carolina, the largest home furniture trade show in the world. Twice a year, Moe’s Home Collection also plays host to a display at its Vancouver location, flying in customers to preview the collections that’ll be shown in North Carolina. “We launch over 400 new items each season,” Sara says.

Both Moe’s Home Collection, Sundays and Canada Sportswear survived the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic; in fact, Moe’s Home Collection grew during the pandemic, Sara says. While the economy has been slow over the past year or two, “we do see improvements already happening, and foresee a really successful 2025,” she adds.

For Canada Sportswear, Ralph sees a “bright future”, including moving to a larger manufacturing facility. “It’s basically a large family,” he says of his team. “In a world that seems to be upside down, at least there are some good things happening right here.”