In my early days, fashion was considered a very high risk industry. The failure rate is very high. Trying to get capital and trying to find people who specialize in that industry is very difficult too.

The hardest thing, particularly in the fashion industry in Canada, has been access to capital.

There's a lot of funding of the media and film in particular, literary publishing gets recognized as culture. I think fashion should too.

I would say I used to spend 60 percent of my time just to raise capital, when I was growing.

No matter how hard it is to raise the capital to do that, do everything in your power to buy every property you have occupied if you can. In the end, that will be worth quite a bit of money.

There are different ways to raise capital that were not available when I was growing my business.

People who come to Canada and have big dreams are really achieving something special from an entrepreneurial perspective.