@weiswesternwear My grandfather came to Canada alone. Fixed boots at night. Sold them during the day. Spent five years apart from my grandmother to build something from nothing. He was blacklisted by vendors who didn't think a Chinese immigrant could sell western wear. So he flew a helicopter to Mexico and went around them. This is how Wei's Western Wear was built. One pair of boots at a time. 🤠
♬ original sound - Wei's Western Wear
Most people know Wei's as a Western wear store. What fewer people know is that for the first stretch of its life, Wei's didn't sell anything at all. It repaired things.
The latest chapter in our founder's story goes back to those years. Wei Mah arrived in Canada alone and set up as a cobbler in Red Deer, working out of a small room with a boot sewing machine and not much else. Whatever he earned fixing shoes, he put toward used boots he could recondition and resell. There was no plan beyond that: repair, sell, reinvest, repeat. Retail grew out of the repair bench, not the other way around.
The video also touches on the part of the story we tell least often: the cost. Wei and his wife Moon married young in China, and when he left for Canada, she stayed behind. They spent nearly five years apart before she was able to join him in 1956. Their first son, Nathan's father, was born four years later. By the time Wei's looked anything like a store, the family behind it had already given up more than most customers would ever guess.
Moon's arrival changed the business as much as the family. She was the one who pushed Wei past footwear, reasoning that the customers buying boots needed jeans and shirts too. However, getting stock wasn't simple. Established brands wanted nothing to do with a Chinese immigrant selling western wear in small-town Alberta, so Wei built his catalogue through smaller vendors and some genuinely improbable buying trips. We've told the wildest of those stories before, in A Helicopter in Mexico, A Legacy in Red Deer.
From there, the store grew the way Red Deer grew. As Alberta's oil patch boomed, western wear became workwear, and Wei's became the place locals sent each other without thinking twice.
Watch the full video above.
￫Shop the boots that started it all