The move comes five years after the fast-turnover, small business-focused market first opened in April 2019. Since then, STACKT has operated with short leases around two years long from the city. The long-term lease, which will end in 2034, will allow the market to invest more in the property, according to Matt Rubinoff, CEO and founder of the market.

“Being able to plan long-term projects now and initiatives, that makes life a lot easier,” Rubinoff said. “For all the businesses around us with it, being able to plan and look into the future farther, it’s great.”

STACKT has been a boon for some local businesses, who use the market’s short-term leases on small retail spaces to test the waters on new ideas. Selina Muriel, founder and owner of apparel brand Carmico, has witnessed that first-hand.

Muriel, from Richmond Hill, started designing key chains and posters at 15 years old, later making clothes and launching Carmico in 2020. After the brand blew up with viral Twitter posts and a Kickstarter, she quit her part-time job at EB Games and hired a team to help her run things.

She hoped to one day open a store in downtown Toronto — but that “felt like a pipe dream, considering the rent prices,” she said. The minimum lease commitment of one year, or in some cases five years, for a retail space made the goal too risky to attempt.

But in October of last year, Carmico received a grant from STACKT for a free month of store space at the market. The shop performed so well that Muriel and her team signed a three-month lease — then re-signed for six months after that.

STACKT offers leases between two weeks and a year, Muriel said.

“You can test your vision,” Muriel said. “If it doesn’t work, then it’s low-risk. But if it does work, then you can really commit after that.”

Since moving into STACKT eight months ago, Muriel has hired three more employees and has increased sales, even beginning to get offers from stores in the U.S. that want to sell Carmico’s clothing. She now wants to scale up to a bigger space and is also eyeing expansion — potentially to Vancouver, where STACKT is opening another market.

Bruce Winder, a retail analyst, ascribes STACKT’s success to shifting economic trends in Canada.

Decades ago, malls were built for the middle class — and now that the middle class has shrunk, more people want to buy local, because it can be cheaper.

“The world is different now,” Winder said. “We’re a much different society than we were and that’s why I think these are popular.”

Indeed, some Toronto malls have seen turnover in their tenants. At the Eaton Centre, Nordstrom closed its 220,000-square-foot flagship store as part of its exodus from the Canadian market, while Old Navy also left the shopping centre earlier this year. New shopping developments are taking different approaches, like The Well at Spadina Avenue and Front Street, a massive indoor-outdoor development similar to those in other cities worldwide.

Stackt has committed to at least a year in its new cities with the hope of keeping them there longer, Rubinoff said.

But if those markets don’t last where they’re planned for — the Ottawa location will open at ByWard Market next week — they can always be moved, according to Rubinoff. At the end of the day, it’s just shipping containers.

That’s part of where the idea came from in the first place. Rubinoff said he was brewing over the idea of a market as early as 2014, but with constraints on the length of the lease, building something that can be moved in the future was important.

“If we can’t afford to purchase the land … we said, well, maybe there’s an opportunity to go and lease the land,” Rubinoff said. “What if we could use a building style that was modular? That would allow us to be more flexible … and if we need to move, we would have that ability to actually pick up the project and move it to another site.”

As it turns out, moving wasn’t necessary. The property at Bathurst and Front, used by a lead smelting facility for nearly a century and later a slaughterhouse, was earmarked for an extension of Front Street in the 2000s. But those plans were abandoned in 2008, and a proposal to build a 19-story tower there was also canned — opening the door to STACKT in 2019.

Now, it will be home to STACKT for at least 10 more years. It’s helping small businesses get their start — and for Muriel, the Carmico founder, bringing her closer to the goal of having multiple stores.

“This makes that pipe dream feel really possible eventually,” Muriel said.