A new store in Bradford is helping customers cut costs just in time for the holiday shopping season.
Following a soft launch in early October, owner Andrey Andreev and his team were joined by council at 44 Bridge St. on Nov. 9 for the grand opening of TK Home, which sells a variety of household items at 30- to 50-per-cent discounts over standard retail price.
Those items are all either overstock, open box, damaged box, floor models or demo units, and include: housewares, furniture, clothing, footwear, appliances, linens, toys, home and garden, and even some non-perishable foods.
“We cover all the categories you can find in a big box retailer,” owner Andrey Andreev said. “We sell everything from non-perishable food to furniture, major appliances and everything in between.”
While the company has started importing some products from the United States and is working on deals with more suppliers to expand their offerings, Andreev explained most of their items currently come directly from one major retailer, but for contractual purposes, he couldn’t reveal which one.
So far, business in Bradford has been “really good,” according to Andreev, who explained local shoppers began buying large appliances and furniture on day one, compared to other locations where it usually takes about two weeks to see those sort of sales.
“This has been one of the best performing stores in the TK Home family,” he said. “The community is amazing and the customers are really good.”
The decision to open a Bradford store came as Andreev said he drives through town almost every day and was impressed with its “huge potential” as it continues to grow.
“We wanted to open in Bradford for a while; we just couldn’t find a location,” he said of the store now in the former home of The Guild of Automotive Restorers, which moved to Innisfil last year.
The Bradford store marks the 13th location for TK Home, expected to be followed by a Whitby location later this month.
It’s all part of a “crazy journey” that has seen the company grow from one store to 14 in about 1.5 years.
While Andreev acknowledges there are plenty of other overstock retailers out there, he feels TK Home has found a model that works best for customers.
“We just took a different approach,” he said. “We did it, by my humble opinion, properly: opened seven days a week, with good stores in retail plazas. These are stores with all the variety our main supplier can offer.”
That successful formula came from years of trying different things, and Andreev explained the whole business actually started as a booth in a flea market in St. Catharines, after he moved to Niagara Falls from Europe to join his brother in 2019.
Later that year, he said they took over a liquidation store in Burlington and despite the COVID-19 pandemic that hit North America in early 2020, they thrived and expanded to four stores and about 27 employees.
Unfortunately, even liquidators couldn’t escape the impacts of the pandemic.
“After COVID everything changed,” Andreev said. “The liquidation business was not working for us.”
Unfortunately, Andreev explained they had to close all but one of their stores and let go of their staff.
“It was just my wife, my sister in-law, my brother and I working in the store,” he said. “We were about two (to) three weeks away from closing for good.”
Then he found a way to work with a major retailer, first by purchasing through a third party, and eventually forming a joint venture with a company out of Brantford.
“We helped them, they helped us, but it didn’t work out,” Andreev said.
By March 2023 he and his family were left with the TK Home brand but no inventory.
That’s when he managed to negotiate a contract directly with the retailer and implement the current business model. While that has been successful, Andreev said he’s working to expand even further, with more locations expected over the coming months, including their first franchise store anticipated to open in January.
“If everything goes well and local communities continue supporting us, we want to try opening in another province,” he said.
Meanwhile, Andreev is also considering ways to give back to the residents who have helped make the business successful.
“Our business in general is community based,” he said. “We want to start a project that will actually help the community in a very innovative way.”
In Bradford, TK Home is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. seven days a week.
More information is available by calling 1-844-922-5585 or by visiting tkhome.ca.
