Over the past two years, many suits, blazers, and pencil skirts have been collecting dust in closets, as the work-from-home model took over.
For those in the business of workwear, it had a major impact.
“We completely shut down at first and then things were painfully slow for quite some time,” Delta Cleaners co-owner Donovan Bisharat said.
“It kind of felt like we weren’t making much headway in the last couple of years, until just recently, really.”
Bisharat says dry-cleaning business is once again starting to pick up. He says they’re seeing more office wear coming in, as more people return to working in offices, but it was yet to reach pre-pandemic levels.
“We definitely started to see people that we didn’t see for maybe two years or a year and a half, they would come and say well, I haven’t needed my shirts or I haven’t needed my suits or whatever,” Bisharat told Global News.
“Some people are coming back, we’re still not seeing the frequency that they would normally have been pre-pandemic.”
Bisharat also says he’s seen more casual clothing coming in, which could also been a side effect of working from home. He says it’s a relief to see business picking up again.
“It gives you some hope that things are starting to move in the right direction and you can kind of see a light at the end of the tunnel and we’re definitely thankful for that,” he said.
The pandemic has also had an impact at Eph Apparel on Smith Street.
“Our day-to-day market is slowly and surely kind of coming back to us, but certainly it’s dependent on each office and their work from home statuses,” Eph Apparel co-owner and director of sales Alex Ethans told Global News.
He says they’ve mostly seen a resurgence in event-based business, for things that had been put on hold for the past two years like graduations and weddings.
“We’re just excited to see people going out and about again, for their real lives. It’s real exciting to see people down at the local coffee shop or a local afternoon lunch wearing a nice suit,” Ethans said.
“For the last couple of years it had kind of gone extinct, for the lack of a better term, because there wasn’t a need or even an ability to go out. So it’s nice to see the downtown here getting a little more lively again, which is going to hopefully produce more results for us as we move forward.”
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