Promoting A Heritage Town

My wife and I have a retail store (.urbanmarket - Perth) in Downtown Heritage Perth Ontario - less than an hour south-west of Ottawa. The retail in this town largely depends on its tourist trade to survive.

In 2001, starting with 9/11, and followed by other events such as SARS, West Nile Virus, the depreciation of the US dollar (relative to the CDN dollar), the number of customers steadily declined causing some grief for the retailers.

One development to help offset this was the web site shop-heritage-perth.com which was the informational site behind a major permanent display mounted in the lobby of the National Arts Centre in nearby Ottawa - the capital city of Canada. That's Mary Colleen and I above, in period costume, at the official unveiling of the display as first mounted.

The display is designed to be completely modular. so that we can change the display quarterly to keep it up to date.

We organized this with the help of 40 of the Downtown Heritage Perth merchants who contributed to the rental of the space.