Why upwegrow's Retail Store Closed — The Full Story
James HansenThe Dream Worked. The Math Didn't. Here's What I Haven't Said Yet.
There's no good way to lose a dream slowly.
If it happened fast — one catastrophic moment, one number that ended everything — I think I could have grieved it like a death. A clear before and after. Instead, what I got was the slow kind. The knowing that crept in over months. The way you start to recognize the shape of something ending before you're willing to say it out loud.
The upwegrow retail store at Southgate Centre is closed. I've been quiet about it. I've been grieving the lose of a dream
What I Saw When I Imagined It Working
I need you to understand what this was, because the loss only makes sense against the dream.
I saw a destination — a place that felt like nothing else in Edmonton. Two thousand, three hundred square feet of rare tropicals, bioactive vivariums, humidity and green and life. A space where the plant person who'd been growing alone in their apartment finally found their people. Where someone walked in knowing nothing and left knowing they wanted to know everything.
I saw myself building something with my own hands. Not answering to anyone. Not sitting in a meeting that could have been an email. I saw the After Dark events — Foliage & Fortune, Snip & Sip — packed with people who showed up because this was the thing they wanted to do on a Friday or Saturday night.
I saw upwegrow becoming a name that meant something in this world.
The store was just the vessel I chose to pour it into. All of the above was the dream.
The Kid Who Asked a Million Questions
There was a kid who came in — I don't remember exactly when — and he just lit up.
He'd been following our posts about bioactive setups. The self-sustaining living vivariums where the cleanup crew does the work and the whole system finds its balance. He had a thousand questions. Not impatient, not testing me — genuinely obsessed, the way I've always been obsessed, and seeing it reflected back in someone discovering it for the first time was something I will carry for a long time.
This is why, I thought. Not the margin. Not the inventory turn rate. This.
That's the part that makes closing hard to explain in business terms alone.
The Truth About What Happened
I've written a full post-mortem with the numbers — the causal chain, the structural failure, all of it. Here's the version that actually matters:
The business worked.
The margins were good. The product was right. Edmonton had real demand for what we were doing. The community showed up. The brand was real.
What didn't work was the vehicle I chose to deliver it in.
A 3100 sq ft mall lease at Southgate meant committing to roughly $176,000 in annual revenue before I'd earned a single dollar. That's what the math required. What we generated in our best year: $130,000. The gap — $46,000 — is where the dream got lost.
The problem wasn't that we failed to sell plants. The problem was that we never had enough capital to stock the floor densely enough, to turn inventory fast enough, to generate the revenue the lease demanded. We were running at 1.4 inventory turns per year. A healthy specialty retailer hits three to four. The shelves that should have been full were thin. And thin shelves don't convert.
Every month we lost money, that loss came out of capital that should have been restocking inventory. Which made the shelves thinner. Which made the problem worse. Which made the shelves thinner. Over and over.
We advanced $60k of our own money trying to outrun the math. We didn't outrun it. Insolvency proceedings are now active. The corporation is winding down.
The business needed approximately $150,000–$180,000 in accessible capital at launch to operate sustainably. What was available at launch was materially less than that. We were born undercapitalized, and we never escaped it.
The Grief. The Fear. The Shame.
I want to name these plainly because I think other people deserve someone to go first.
The grief hits you sideways. I'd be in the space before open — in the quiet with the plants and the humidity and the grow lights warming up — and I'd feel something close to the purest form of what I'd wanted. And then immediately feel how far it was from what I'd hoped it could be. The gap between the thing you imagined and the thing you actually have is its own specific kind of pain. It doesn't announce itself. It just lives there.
The fear is less rational but no less real. What does it mean to fail a corporation? What do I owe the people I owe? What does this say about my judgment, my capability, my right to try again? These questions arrive at 2 a.m. like they're important. Some of them are.
The shame is the quietest and the heaviest. We have all this cultural language around "failing fast" and "learning and pivoting," and none of it is wrong exactly, but it papers over something that is just genuinely hard: I built this. I put everything I had into it. I got it wrong in a way that cost me financially, emotionally, and in ways I'm still accounting for. And now I have to tell people.
So I'm telling people.
What I Want to Say to Everyone Who Showed Up
To every person who walked through our door at our first location or Southgate, came to an After Dark event, ordered a plant through the site, shared a post, or told a friend — thank you. You were not incidental to this. You were the whole point.
I'm sorry I couldn't make it last in that form. I wanted to. I believed for a long time that I could.
And here's the promise I can actually make: upwegrow isn't gone. The corporation is. The lease is gone. The mall location is gone. But the brand is not the building, and the community is not the square footage.
Gratitude. Grief. And a promise. That's what I have for you.
What Comes Next
upwegrow is transitioning to a sole proprietorship. Online-first — the Shopify store is being rebuilt and restocked. Events will continue in formats that don't require a fixed lease to justify the square footage.
And I'm building the education side of what this was always supposed to be. Courses, content, guides — the kind of deep, no-shame plant knowledge that made that kid's eyes light up. The model that nearly broke me proved one thing clearly: the community is real and the demand is there. I just needed to stop tying it to $44,000 a year in rent.
Obsessed so you don't have to be. That was always the promise. I'm just delivering it through a different door now.
I don't have a tidy bow to put on this. The loss is real. The debt is real. The grief is ongoing.
But I built something people loved. I know exactly what went wrong and why. And I'm still here, still growing — in a structure that actually makes sense this time.
That's enough to start from.
— James
If you want the full financial breakdown — the causal chain, the inventory math, all of it — I'll be publishing the complete post-mortem as a case study. The point of sharing it is simple: if you're running a specialty retail operation and your rent is above 10% of revenue, read it before I did.