How Fosetter Opened Its Storefront

Carmen, who owns Fosetter, recorded a short video at the shop to explain how the business got started. Here it is in her words.

Hello everyone, and welcome back. Our business puts the trade first, and profit comes after. Once we do the quality of the trade well, the business will slowly follow. Today I want to show you how I started this business.

An Uncle who saw something in me

As most of you know, before I got into this line, I had already been in the restaurant business for over a dozen, close to twenty years. By chance, I met a senior figure in the American ginseng trade. He's the one who brought me into it. Back then, this Uncle told me I had the potential to do American ginseng. Money has to be earned slowly.

Six months in a small office

At the start we rented a small office for six months. After six months of running the business there, a shopfront here in Chinatown happened to come back to me. So we officially started a storefront business, a real physical shop. And that brought even more challenges.

Why does a physical shop bring bigger challenges? The first thing a shop has to face is the rent. Then there's the renovation you have to do before opening. And we have to hire people.

All the paperwork

Once those three things were in place, we had to register the brand. First we went to register the business, and then got our tax number from the tax office. Then, for our NATIVE ULTRA brand, we went through a lawyer to the trademark office and got the trademark registered.

The food permit gets registered once a year. My daughter and I both took the food hygiene certificate, to make sure our business is run in a hygienic and legal way.

After the brand was filed, we had a year of using TM. After 12 to 18 months of strict screening, our NATIVE ULTRA brand could switch to a registered ®. Because what we're building is a shop for genuine, quality goods, we registered Fosetter (富時達) as a trademark too.

The back of every one of our products has our company information on it. That way, everything that leaves our company is guaranteed genuine.

More to come

That's the foundation it took to open a physical shop. Next, I'll slowly show you more of the details of how we run things day to day.

Want to know what came before the storefront? Read how this address went from a Hong Kong-style bakery to a ginseng shop. You can see the NATIVE ULTRA range here, read more about us, or visit at 78 Rue De La Gauchetière Ouest in Montreal's Chinatown.