To do our part in keeping our community safe, Window Wonderland 2020 will be self-guided this year!

While the Window Wonderland evening has been an annual tradition as a ‘kick-off’ to the holiday season and will be missed by us all, we hope you will still pay us a visit.

Spread out throughout the season, stay safe, and come out to enjoy the festive window displays in a self-guided format.

You can also view the YouTube video: CLICK HERE

While the one-day Window Wonderland event cannot proceed, your Village shops are here for our customers and will be delivering a relaxed, quality holiday shopping experience.

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Show off your costume in a safe and fun way! Drop by either Brighten Up Location on Halloween Day to Trick or Treat at your favourite Toy Store. Everyone who comes by in Costume will get a free Treat, plus a Ballot to enter our Halloween Draw!

Watch our Facebook page that day for pictures of the fantastic costumes that we are sure to see (with parent permission, of course!).

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The reopening celebration will include a Sidewalk Sale, ‘Off-the-Face’ Painting, COVID-Friendly Make-and-Take Crafts, Door Prizes and Giveaways, and more!

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It's been a challenging few months, but we are still here and we are open for business! We will be celebrating to mark our opening in Fergus! There will be some COVID-safe activities, promotions, draws and demonstrations. More details will be released in the coming weeks, and we hope to see you there!

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We are continuing our safe, cautious return to business. July 2nd stores resume regular hours. Makin' Faces Returns with "Off the Face" Painting! And, we bring back some contactless demo products in the coming weeks. 

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What’s it like to re-open?

I’ve been asked this question fairly regularly over the past week. Some people are concerned for us, others curious, and the rest likely think it’s what they should be asking right now. Whatever the case... thank you for asking!

For us, the re-opening was hardly a ‘back to work’ moment. Stephanie and I - along with sidekick Cassandra - have been working as much, if not more than ever, during this crisis. Everything takes longer, is less impactful and seems to take more brain power than it used to.

We spent a lot of time planning for re-opening. You can’t plan for everything, but you can have procedures in place and do your best to communicate them to your team and your customers. That has been our focus. It has been wonderful having our team members start coming back to work. We’ve missed them - whether they’ve worked for us for months and years, or in the case of our team in Fergus only a few days before closure. It’s also been so nice to see and hear from so many of our wonderful customers!

What are the customers like? This question, when asked, tends to be a way of asking what to expect when coming to the store. I’ve been working out of Fergus as we get our location there going, but checking in with the team in Erin usually a few times a day. We have been significantly limiting public access and have put in place quite a few what I think are reasonable precautions, and by and large customers both inside and outside of our stores have been cooperating. Like everywhere, there are those that feel it’s all over or doesn’t impact them and any precaution is excessive, there are those that are very nervous and hesitant to come into a store - and most people are somewhere in between. We are aiming to keep everyone - no matter where they are at in that spectrum - as comfortable with our environment as possible, and hopefully are being successful with that. It has certainly been wonderful to be able to focus on customer service in person again.

On that note, there is of course the ‘wonderful’ Facebook groups replete with conversation about reopening. I follow quite a few in both communities and there are a lot of opinions, and I have no intention of ‘going there’ on the topics of masks or anything else. All I will say is could we please recognize that businesses are REQUIRED to have precautions and procedures in place to be allowed to be open. If we don’t have them in place and do what we can to ensure they are executed, we are not allowed to be open. It’s that simple.

That being said we can only do so much in terms of enforcement. We need you to help us to stay open. How? Pretty simple... I don’t care if there are markings and posters or not, PRACTICE PHYSICAL DISTANCING. We have markings here in our stores to help but it’s not possible to have them in all places throughout the community or even at all businesses... but let’s be honest, I really think we can figure out keeping at least 6 feet apart to respect one another, whether there are marks on the ground or not.

Aside from that a lot of our energy is about trying to stay focused on the long game. Early in the crisis we recognized this was going to take a financial toll and secured access to a fairly significant amount of additional business debt so we can carry through the short term while ensuring that our team, suppliers and other financial obligations are met. We just have to hope and plan that we can get revenues back in balance with expenses. If this drags on long term we - like many, many other businesses - won’t have the debt capacity to survive.

What’s next? I cycle between cautious optimism and pessimistic planning. Sometimes I think it’s time to schedule the team all the way until July, other times I’m thinking about what we’re going to do if that scale back order comes and we have to close, as the numbers continue to climb.

Most importantly, let’s all stay healthy and safe! Continue reading

I want to share a few 'thoughts' with you on my own personal experiences as we navigate through this challenging time. You might ask, isn’t a little soon to be writing this? You bet! However, it doesn’t hurt to think ahead and I anticipate that my next few weeks are going to be very busy as we get ready to operate in the ‘new normal’. I do also have a few shout outs interspersed, although his is far from an exhaustive list of the many people who have supported us! Continue reading

At end of day on March 23rd Brighten Up closed our retail stores. We also made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend online or delivery options as well. While we were aware that this measure was more extensive than those taken by some other businesses, we believed it was necessary to initiate a complete shut-down of all of our operations in the short-term.

 

We appreciate that most customers have respected our decision to keep ourselves, our employees and our customers safe as a top priority without rushing into any new service options without proper time and consideration. Myself, Stephanie and Baby Cassandra have been following a strict physical and social distancing protocol since being closed. We have also used that time to consider our role and contribution to community, to engage with and understand social and physical distancing to the best of our ability, and to educate ourselves through the ever-changing information provided by health professionals and government leaders. Given the nature of our business, we were exposed to a significant number of members of the public during the days and weeks leading up to our closure, and it was very important to us to be able to monitor our own health so that we did not take any actions – including making any deliveries – that may have placed the health and well-being of others in jeopardy.

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In light of COVID-19 we have decided to move our in-store Easter Colouring contest online to give the kids (& adults) a fun activity to do safely at home!

Instructions:
- Print out the image
- Colour, decorate, design... have fun and be creative!
- Snap a picture of your finished result and post it to our Facebook page. Make sure to tell us whether you are from Erin or Fergus!

 

 

 

For DAILY activities, fun and conversation during our period of non-essential business closure, follow us at: https://www.facebook.com/brightenuptoysandgames

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