Come July 8, Greater Sudbury's geek community will no longer have a physical place to get their wares.
MojoVerse is closing up shop and making the transition to an online shop only.
Co-owners Joelle Lavoie and Moe Charette said the decision to close the store was a difficult one, but it was necessary as the costs of offering officially licensed products was just too high to maintain the business.
“The big challenge was keeping the costs of our products down,” said Charette. “We want everything we sell to be officially licensed – we don't want to sell knock-offs to anyone – so we have to import pretty much everything, because there is no Canadian distributors for the things we offer.”
The couple had high hopes when they opened MojoVerse on The Kingsway in December 2015.
“We're really huge geeks ourselves, and we saw there was not one concentrated place with anime and sci-fi merchandise available in Sudbury,” said Lavoie.
“We attended fan conventions, and we wanted this store to reflect that vendors' floor, where you sell a little bit of everything,” Charette said. “There wasn't a store like that in Sudbury, so we decided to open one.”
One of the things they will miss most is the interaction with their regular customers, many of whom became friends, and some of whom actually volunteered their time to work at the store.
“It was nice to have that interaction with the local geeks and nerds,” Charette said. “Many of our customers would just come here to hang out.”
Lavoie and Charette said they are well aware there is a massive movement to online shopping.
“People just don't seem to want to be bothered with going to a store these days,” Charette said.
Transitioning to online will allow MojoVerse to keep overhead costs down, and they will have just as much product, if not more, available as they did instore, Lavoie said. And, there's potential to extend their reach beyond Greater Sudbury, because they will be able to ship product Canada wide.
Although we would have liked to see the store last longer, we're excited about the website,” Charette said. "The community has been awesome. People have been reaching out and offering their support, because they seem to understand. It was a tough decision, because we really do like the store. We really had to think about it for a while, but it just got to the unfortunate point where we had to go in this direction.”
The new website, Mojoverse.ca, will offer monthly podcasts, a nerdy community calendar with dates for conventions and future events, as well as contests and newsletters, plus more. It will be rolled out within the next couple of weeks, said Lavoie.
And, by having solely an online presence, it will allow Charette and Lavoie to free up their schedule to attend even more conventions in the future, to scour the industry and bring more of selection to their customers.
