How shopping local can lead to something bigger.

Hi I’m Amanda Penner. Along with my husband Jeff, we run a children’s leather shoe company called Minimoc.

Shopping local has come to mean so much more to us since we started Minimoc, we truly have our local community to thank for our ability to grow our business over the past year and a half.

We started Minimoc out of our home in September of 2013. I was looking for handmade gifts to give our friends who were having babies, so I used some leather remnants that Jeff had, from making wallets for his groomsmen at our wedding. I posted the first pair on Facebook and people wanted to buy them! We then tested the local scene with our moccasins at the fall and winter markets put on by Spruce Collective. The ladies who own Spruce Collective encouraged us to go into wholesale, and we now provide to over 50 stores across Canada and the world. This gave us the opportunity (and the demand) to move Minimoc out of our home and into a warehouse where we are able to provide jobs for a number of people in our community.

You see, if it weren’t for people who valued local small businesses, we wouldn’t be able to achieve our dreams.  We write “Made with Love in Canada” on every box, but to people in our community it also means “Made in Abbotsford”, and “Made Locally.” There are a lot of other people in our community working towards their dreams. We encourage you to check out their businesses as well.

Some Local Businesses in Abbotsford that we frequent often:

Other local dreamers like us who we’ve met along the way in the children’s clothes Category:

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Amanda Penner