Local hardware store closure leaves customers in the lurch

After 30 years in business, Victoria Specialty Hardware (VSH)—a store offering high-end decorative home fixtures and plumbing supplies—closed without warning last month.

Customers and contractors in the middle of home-renovation projects found the doors locked during its regular store hours. Signs taped to those doors, dated Jan. 19, say the store was closing “due to unforeseen circumstances” and that “more information will be forthcoming.”

But so far, there’s been no word as to why the store shut so abruptly—and customers say they are out thousands of dollars.

Suzanne Marion told Capital Daily she and her husband—who works as an interior designer—have been VHS customers for decades, having done business with the hardware store’s original owners, Bob and Sue Emslie, and the current owners, Aaron and Michelle Eicher.

Marion said she had a great relationship with the Emslies, who were “always in the store”—a presence, she says, that wasn’t felt with their successors.

“We've never met the new owners, never seen them on site,” Marion said. “We knew the staff, and we've been dealing with the manager for years. I said to my husband, you know, I think the new owners were absent owners.”

The store opened on Oak Bay Avenue in 1995 before relocating to Boleskine Road in 2013. The business served not only the Victoria community, but had customers across Canada and the US.

In a Jan. 15 email from VSH, Marion and her husband were told that a specialty door handle they had ordered in December and paid for would arrive “any day.” Marion’s husband was also waiting on a stone sink for a bathroom renovation he’s working on, with an additional installation kit purchased for it. The sink and the kit cost a combined $1,500, and the couple is now wondering if they’ll ever see these items—or the money they spent on them.

Around this time, Marion brought in her own specialty makeup mirror that had a defective wall attachment. VSH staff told her they would send it to the manufacturer in the US. She’s now wondering if it ever made it to the manufacturer or if it’s still waiting in the shuttered store. She bought the mirror 10 years ago for $650; the same mirror would cost $2,000 to replace today, she said.

Marion said she can only assume it’s a foreclosure situation.

“Hopefully, there's at one point a liquidation sale so we can get our supplies, or I can buy a new mirror for myself,” she said.

In the meantime, she’s hoping her credit card insurance will cover the cost of the supplies. Her husband has repurchased the items for the bathroom renovation from a store in Vancouver.

Willy Egeland, owner of Footprint Custom Carpentry Inc., said products he ordered for his customers’ projects arrived a week before the VSH closure—a month later, he says he “cannot seem to find a way to access the products.”

Egeland told Capital Daily that the products he ordered—plumbing fixtures for a carriage house—are worth $3,300. After weeks of unanswered calls and emails, his client has had to reorder the same products from another supplier, significantly increasing the cost of the project’s plumbing.

Egeland said he spoke with employees at a neighbouring storefront, who told him they saw the Eichers enter the store on a Sunday—a day the store is closed—to remove all expensive products from their windows. The next day, he was told, when VSH employees arrived for work, they were locked out.

The store remained listed as open up until this week, when its Google business profile was changed to “permanently closed.”

Egeland is still trying to get through to the Eichers, with the hope a resolution is still possible.

“I truly hope I can still get our products,” he said. “It only seems fair.”