Gastown's One of a Few came about its perfectly fitting name serendipitously. In 2005 owner Michelle Rizzardo was on her first buying trip in LA for her nascent, nameless boutique and needed a name to put on her purchase orders. When someone suggested “One of a Few” so she could make her orders the name resonated and stuck.
The store itself came about a bit serendipitously as well. Michelle had worked in retail since she was 15 but she never thought of it as a “real” career. After her undergrad degree she took BCIT's entrepreneurship program as prep for her MBA.
“At BCIT I started managing a store and repping brands. I was doing the due diligence for managing my own store without realizing that that was what I wanted to do. Even my business plan for the program was all about owning a shop. People kept pushing me to start a shop and I kept saying 'No, no, this isn't a career,'” explains Michelle. Her friends all knew what she should be doing before she did and thankfully she listened to them, as a decade later One of a Few is a Gastown fixture.
