Turnover is fast in the antiques business, but at Dundas West’s The Chief Salvage Co., owner Cody Deane has found it very easy to get attached.
The Chief Salvage Co. started in a period of flux for owner Cody Deane, when she had just moved back to Toronto after living abroad and wasn’t quite sure what her next step should be. “A couple of years ago while I was living in Glasgow I started collecting stuff pretty regularly from this super-weird junk shop,” she says, “When I came home I was deciding what I was going to end up doing and it was either open up this shop or go back to art school—if I went back and finished I saw myself in the exact same position a couple of years down the road, where I’d still be like, ‘Okay, what should I do with my life?’”
The carefully constructed displays at the shop draw on Deane’s abilities as an artist, creating the store’s very strong aesthetic—this, however, can lead to some less commercially viable buying behavior on her part, as she finds herself making some purchases solely based on how they’ll support other items in an arrangement. “I’ll buy a single dumbbell and whoever I’m buying with at the time will be like, ‘Why?’” she says. “It’s just there to enhance the look of the shop, but then surprisingly someone will buy it and that’s so validating.”
Deane has developed a strong sense of her customers’ tastes in the year and a half she’s been open. “I’ve learned what people want, so I’m able to cut out the nonsense stuff,” she says. Still, there’s a rather specific look and feel to the shop, and given its small size, there isn’t much room to deviate from it. “I won’t buy things that I know people will buy if it doesn’t fit in with the aesthetic of the shop—I don’t take on kitschy kitchenware and things like that,” says Deane. “It’s very specific to my eye and so far it’s worked out.”
It’s the quirkier and more esoteric items that tend to move most quickly at The Chief. “I’ll know pretty immediately when I get something, I’ll be like, ‘This is going to fly out of the shop.’ And it usually does. And it’ll be something weird,” she says. “One of my favourite things that I found was this really beautiful 1940s bug collection in a cigar box. It was someone’s personal collection, but it was museum quality—each of the bugs had a little tiny label with the date and where the bug came from and it was all meticulously laid out. I had that in the shop for a little bit. Some of those things I feel like I don’t get to enjoy for long enough.”
With some of the more unique items, a certain sense of attachment can form. “I’ve only had maybe one or two instances where I was kind of devastated,” says Deane. “When we sold Michael the Mummified Squirrel I was really upset—he would sit on top of the cabinet over there and I was so into him.”
Keeping a reasonable price point at the shop has been important to Deane from day one. “That was part of my objective when I opened the shop to begin with,” she says. “I never really wanted to take things past a certain point. I know that the clientele for the shop are younger people who, like me, have been bummed for years going into kind of boring antique shops with not really the stuff they’re looking for that’s too expensive anyway.”
One of the ways she does this is by maintaining a quick turnaround on generally smaller items and mid-sized furniture, rather than monopolizing her limited space with prohibitively priced pieces of a grand scale. “I get a lot of my joy out of finding things and passing them along reasonably quickly. We have to have a faster turnover so that I can bring new stuff into the shop, so it’s not in my interest to have stuff in the shop forever,” says Deane. “I have the advantage—and sometimes disadvantage, I guess—of the shop being small, so I don’t have to fill a giant space.”
The space itself, which still sports the sign of its former tenant, the Dufferin Smoke Shop, was on Deane’s radar right from the early planning stages. “I had my eye on this space for a long time and had wondered what was going to happen to it, because it was sort of just sitting there for a while. I ended almost signing leases with places that would not have been right for this shop,” says Deane. “As soon as I found out who this building got sold to, I went through the process of finding out who the landlord now was and then I ended up seeing it before it went on the market. It couldn’t have worked out more perfectly—it’s just a great spot to be in.”
Located on a less trafficked strip of Dundas West, Deane has found that her booth at the Junction Flea this summer has helped expand her reach. “It’s amazing, it’s really fun! I think it’s exposing us to people who are a little further afoot that way,” she says. “The quality of vendors is really impressive—there’s some guys there with some really great stuff, and I’ve found some amazing stuff there myself.”
Deane is currently preparing for a picking trip to Texas, where she’ll acquire much of the shop’s fall and winter stock. “I’m just coming to the end of a really crazy picking season—I’ve been doing upstate New York a lot,” she says. “But our big Texas trip is mid-September, so we’ll come back in the beginning of October with tons of new stuff.”
1493 Dundas Street West. 647-352-1983. #DNW
