Do Vancouver Brands Forget Vancouver? The Growing Disconnect Between Homegrown Success Stories & The City That Built Them

There’s a particular kind of pride Vancouverites feel when one of our own makes it big.

We watched Lululemon grow from a tiny back room in a second-story hair salon on West 4th Avenue into a global fashion force. We saw ILIA Beauty emerge from the West Coast clean beauty scene before becoming an international Sephora staple. We championed Saje Natural Wellness when wellness retail still felt niche, long before eucalyptus oil became a lifestyle.

But as more Vancouver-founded brands scale into multinational success stories, a question has quietly started circulating among the city’s media, creators, and longtime customers: once these companies “make it,” why does Vancouver so often feel left behind?

The pattern is familiar. Headquarters shift to Toronto, New York or Los Angeles. Influencer trips, launch dinners and splashy activations increasingly happen elsewhere. Local media outlets that supported brands early struggle to secure interviews or participation in editorial stories. The creators who wore, photographed and organically promoted these companies from the beginning watch campaigns increasingly prioritize bigger markets and bigger numbers.

And the customers? Many feel forgotten, too.

There’s something symbolic about remembering that Vancouver-founded Aritzia was once just a single rack at Hill’s of Kerrisdale. Long before the Soho flagship stores and celebrity campaigns, there were Vancouver women lining up at Pacific Centre, shopping warehouse sales and building the brand into a local institution through genuine loyalty and word-of-mouth.

For marketing expert and Vancouver creator Erin Sousa, the shift is real—and increasingly noticeable.

“As brands scale, there’s often a natural pull toward larger markets like Toronto or major U.S. cities because that’s where they perceive the biggest opportunity—more media, more visibility, more perceived ‘status,’” she says. “In the early stages, brands rely heavily on their local community—creators, editors, and early adopters—to build credibility and momentum. But as they grow, there’s a tendency to shift focus toward scale and new audiences, often without realizing that the foundation they’re moving away from is actually what made them credible in the first place.”

Sousa believes the long-term cost is deeper than many brands realize.

“The cost is trust, and trust is everything,” she explains. “When a brand forgets the people and communities who supported them early on, they risk losing the authenticity that made them resonate in the first place. You might gain reach, but you lose depth.”

That tension became especially apparent while reporting this story.

After reaching out to multiple Vancouver-founded brands for interviews about maintaining ties to their hometown communities, responses varied dramatically. Saje acknowledged the concern directly.

“Our hometown is always incredibly important to us,” said Sari Friedman, Senior Director, Consumer Engagement, Saje. “We have plans in place to connect with creators and media in varying areas to drive deeper relationships … some of those events were in Toronto as well as more intimate ones in Vancouver. We’re currently working on a very exciting activation in our hometown for August that we can’t wait to be a part of.”

Meanwhile, ILIA Beauty—despite recently hosting an elegant Vancouver dinner event at Selene—ultimately declined to participate in the piece. The brand’s PR representative noted that the senior leadership team would be “heads down and traveling” and “not sure we will be able to participate/be a voice in this story.”

Aritzia similarly declined participation after initially engaging with the inquiry and asking follow-up questions about the article’s scope and timing.

The silence itself feels telling.

Because this isn’t really about whether a brand hosts one dinner in Vancouver or sends out the occasional PR package. It’s about whether success changes who gets prioritized—and whether brands remember that community is not just something you leverage on the way up.

Sousa points to what she calls a major industry blind spot.

“There’s still this outdated belief that influence and relevance are concentrated in major markets,” she says. “When brands chase visibility over connection, they risk becoming diluted. The content might look bigger, but it often feels less real.”

Ironically, Vancouver’s quieter, less performative culture may have helped many of these brands build their identities in the first place. The city’s wellness-forward lifestyle, understated luxury aesthetic and loyal creative communities became part of the branding blueprint these companies later exported globally.

But as scale enters the picture, local relationships can begin to feel transactional instead of reciprocal.

For independent media especially, the imbalance is increasingly difficult to ignore. Editorial outlets spend years providing unpaid coverage, storytelling, cultural validation and local visibility—only to find themselves shut out of more meaningful journalistic conversations once brands become large enough to carefully control messaging.

“The smartest brands don’t ‘move on’ from their founding city—they build from it,” says Sousa. “It’s not about staying small. It’s about staying connected.”

And perhaps that’s the real question Vancouver is asking its homegrown success stories right now: not whether they’ve grown, but whether they still remember where they came from. —Noa Nichol