Worst Day on the Job: When Private & Co. owner Perry Lam was forced to move out of Vancouver’s Gastown

Perry Lam originally launched Private & Co. under a different name, in a different location. The men’s casual wear store used to be Private Stock in Vancouver’s Gastown, but just a few months into the opening, Lam’s landlord announced that he was going to triple the rent. “I know, I know, never enter into a verbal agreement. I’m a bit old school—sometimes good vibes go a long way,” says Lam. The hunt to find a new spot left the entrepreneur questioning everything at the time, but, looking back, he feels grateful for the fresh start because it gave him an opportunity to rebuild and rebrand from the ground up.

We opened up in October 2021, which we thought would be the end of COVID. We finally started to see businesses and things opening up, some normalcy happening. So I felt like it was a good time for a new clothing store in Vancouver—especially for men, there’s not a whole lot of options.

I have a retail background and I wanted to create a comfortable shopping experience for men. We had a verbal agreement with our landlord at that time, which was a great deal, but considering our location—we weren’t in the core of Gastown—it was always a little bit troublesome.

For six months, he was going to give me a good deal and we were going to renegotiate after that. But after that six months, he said he needed to raise the rent. He told me, “I can raise it up by double-ish for the next couple of months and then I’m going to have to triple within the next six months.”

With that being said—and COVID wasn’t over: Omicron had hit so everybody was back in their bubble—it was definitely a challenge to be a new business struggling. Like, are we going to close down? Are we going to open up somewhere else? Is anything else going to be affordable? I just didn’t believe that there were good rates still out there.

We’re still fairly niche in our category, which is good, but at the same time our competitors have been around for 10 to 15 years. Being the new kid on the block, it was kind of hard to establish ourselves.

So we started looking at a new location and eventually found our place in Chinatown, just three blocks east from the old location. It was a bit more of a natural fit. Our landlord was a family friend of my godfather’s, and the space had sat empty for seven years.

Now, on Pender and Columbia, we’re more or less smack dab in the middle of Chinatown. What’s great is that, if you go east, you have all the Chinese restaurants and stuff like that—there are a couple of Michelin-starred restaurants down the street from us. And then to the west, you have the Chinese Canadian Museum, you have the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden and Chinese Cultural Centre. So it’s nice to be between the old and the new, to have the inviting attractions of the museums. It’s nice to be in the touristy area.

We quickly made friends with our neighbours and started becoming part of the community. And it’s going both ways—the community has definitely helped us and we try to give back to it as well. It’s positive reinforcement that we’re on the right track and we’re doing what we want to do as well as helping with the bigger picture of trying to rebuild Chinatown.

Moving was a huge blessing in disguise. Even the clientele has been better. With Gastown, it was always harder to get traffic down there. That location was getting worse and worse post-COVID, and other neighbouring businesses were also starting to close up.

Now we’re getting more young families coming into the store, and people telling us stories about our location—it used to be a restaurant. People have gotten engaged in there, had parties and dinners… it’s nice to be in a place that has such a history. We want to be able to still tell the story of what was there before us, and still very much be part of the community now.

This interview has been edited and condensed.