Bichette

When she was five years old, Lauren Erickson asked her mother to stop shopping for her because she had her own style. Lauren, now the owner of the urban contemporary lifestyle boutique, La Bichette, knew she wasn't destined for the academic world of her parents. Having always played and experimented with her sense of style from her earliest days wearing a PVC dress, opening her own store in June 2013 was a slow build after spending 10 years in the fashion world working for boutiques and fashion houses. "In high school, I realized I was an extroverted, theatre- and language-loving self-taught woman destined for fashion," Lauren says.

While Lauren had opened a pop-up shop during Hamilton's Supercrawl in 2012, it wasn't until passing through the Makers' Market across from her current location during Artcrawl that the possibility of La Bichette resonated. "I thought to myself, 'if I could have a shop anywhere, it would be here,'" Lauren says of seeing the empty unit as her dream for the first time. Her experience as a wedding and event planner, combined with her love of visual merchandising, has allowed her to create a retail atmosphere that features quality products that Lauren would feel good about purchasing for herself, from leather handbags and bridal lingerie, to the apparel whose contemporary styling echoes classic details.