When the first spring of the COVID-19 pandemic neared, West Coast Seeds found itself scrambling to satisfy Canadians who had nowhere to go and little else to do than garden.
"We noticed a huge escalation in sales — and I'm not talking 20 per cent. I mean hundreds or thousands," recalled Aaron Saks, president of the Delta, B.C.-based seed business.
"I don't even know how to calculate how much growth we were seeing on our website, but it was to the point where our competitors ... had to shut down their websites for the most part because they just couldn't keep up with orders."
To be able to handle skyrocketing demand, West Coast Seeds started to only accept orders during a four-hour window between Tuesday and Thursday. Almost 200 staff, including many new members, worked around the clock from outdoor wedding tents erected to help with social distancing measures and wound up fulfiling so many orders, they ran out of paper packets and had to source envelopes from Staples instead.
Five years later, the crew is still going strong but has moved into less haphazard digs as the 42-year-old seed business continues to revel in pandemic-induced growth and a new wave slowly materializing amid U.S. tariff threats.
The experience makes West Coast Seeds one of the many Canadian businesses that saw the pandemic deepen their relationship with existing customers and court new ones who have stuck around even as the health crisis has dissipated.
These pandemic beneficiaries unexpectedly saw sports gear, baking ware, crafting materials and even sweatsuits and pyjamas fly off the shelves as lockdowns inspired people to take up new hobbies. They are now hoping their customers will hang on, so they don't wind up like the wave of businesses whose brush with see-sawing demand pushed them to close during or in the wake of the pandemic.
Though sales have slid from pandemic heights, sellers of COVID-19's hot-ticket items say demand has been persistent enough to warrant the expansion of their operations and the tailoring of their product selection to meet the needs of their larger customer bases.
West Coast Seeds, for example, is exploring a new facility, while The Guild House, a Toronto game shop and café which opened a week before the pandemic began, is pouring resources into events for customers who developed an affinity for board games and role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons during the health crisis.
"We had people who would buy a small Warhammer box and next thing you know, they're buying a 2,000-point army," said owner Cat Van Wert, of the pandemic spike in interest in the game pitting players and their armies of heroic miniatures against each other.
Many of those games now happen at The Guild House, which holds evenings for customers dedicated to painting Warhammer miniatures and Magic the Gathering tournaments.
Every event brings even more new faces.
"I see them come by and they try it and they're hooked," said Van Wert, who suspects interest keeps building even as people cut back on discretionary spending because people are longing for connection.
At Scrap Chicks, an Oakbank, M.B., paper craft shop, customer interest has been just as hearty following lockdowns.
The store was barely open eight months when COVID-19 began and many people took up scrapbooking for the first time or returned to the hobby they had been too busy to keep up with before.
"If you're not familiar with my business, it may sound like a scrapbooking store. How busy could that be?" owner Sheila Lamb said.
"But paper crafting has just morphed into so much more than the traditional 12 by 12 sticky sheets scrapbooks that everybody is most familiar with growing up."
The six in 10 customers who Lamb estimates turned to scrapbooking during the pandemic — and have kept at it — have realized the pastime can involve intricate stamps and die cutters, bold inks and foils, and even paper speckled with zany icons like bathroom staples.
"There was no toilet paper shortage in my industry," Lamb joked of the loo roll-adorned pages she sold.
Demand for products referencing the pandemic are no longer big hits for Scrap Chicks, but the company continues to grow steadily. It only saw its first "slight dip" last year, when economic conditions strained customer budgets.
Lamb suspects people are sticking with the hobby even as consumer purchasing power limps along because it can be an outlet for stress, a means of self-preservation and an excuse to gather with other crafters.
Their loyalty is being tested as growing animosity between Canada and the U.S. pummels each countries' economy and stands to make the cost of goods on both sides of the border more expensive, thus squeezing budgets for the discretionary goods pandemic beneficiaries sell.
Merril Mascarenhas, managing partner at Arcus Consulting Group in Toronto, thinks whether pandemic beneficiaries can weather this storm comes down to the wealth effect — a measure of how wealthy consumers feel, rather than how much money they actually have.
"I'm a glass half empty person right now," he said.
He's not the only one feeling that way. Scores of other companies didn't make it out of the pandemic and even many of those that did are still struggling to pay off debt or coming to terms with the reality that they may never rebound.
Sidesaddle Bikes will soon be among the casualties. Owner Andrea Smith plans to close the Vancouver shop on March 21 because it's become "too difficult" to operate.
"It went from being like a fun, creative endeavour trying to serve the community to rowing the boat and bailing the boat at the same time and just trying to stay afloat and prevent a terrible outcome," she said.
The beginning of the end for the 10-year-old store came when people fervently took up cycling during the pandemic.
One day, Smith looked up and realized there was nary a bike left on the shop floor and up to 400 calls were coming in daily from customers desperate for a ride.
With most bikes made overseas by a few factories that decide on production rates two years in advance and every company pushing for more supply, Smith said it was impossible to restock.
"It was just a long wait before we saw any more product," Smith said.
"By the time the product finally did arrive, the demand bubble had long since dissipated and then we were stuck with bikes that we couldn't sell."
Bike accessories were equally hard to move because the pandemic conditioned people to shop online and many didn't ditch the habit when lockdowns lifted.
Sidesaddle Bikes chugged on with repairs, but finding mechanics was hard and Smith eventually admitted something had to change.
She tried to sell the business, but no one wanted it, so now she's accepted it's time to close.
Given what other businesses have gone through, Saks from West Coast Seeds considers it fortunate his company hasn't just survived but also thrived.
The business seems poised to emerge from the trade crisis in the same shape because times of trouble remind people of all the things growing your own food is a solution for.
"There may not be the COVID concerns," said Saks, "but there's still the same concerns about rising food costs, food security and sustainability."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 12, 2025.
Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press
