Flying Tiger Copenhagen opened its first Canadian store at CF Toronto Eaton Centre last month, and the aniticpation for it started before the doors did.
It took ten years to get here. “Canada has been a dream of ours for a decade,” said Jens Aarup Mikkelsen, Chief Executive Officer of Flying Tiger Copenhagen, who flew in from Copenhagen for the opening. “We have heard for years how many Canadian consumers visit our stores in Japan and across Europe, whether for studies or travel. Toronto is a great city, diverse and vibrant. If there is a place we should launch, it could only be the Eaton Centre.”
Eighty percent of what’s on the shelves is priced at ten dollars or less. “We are design driven, but it’s about making sure Danish design doesn’t come with a Danish price tag,” Mikkelsen said. “That is what customers have come to expect from us in Europe, and landing that same pricing here is going to make this launch even more exciting for Canadian shoppers.”
The night before the doors opened to the public, Cadillac Fairview and Fox Group hosted a preview event for influencers and brand partners, the kind of soft launch that has become standard for international retailers entering a new market at this level. Mikkelsen watched the response build a full day before the general public ever saw the store.
“The joy on the faces of the people waiting in that line said everything,” he said of opening day itself. “We have five stores opening over the next couple of months, but Canada could be a hundred-store market for us. There’s no ceiling in a market like this, and that first hour told us as much.”
For Cadillac Fairview, the opening is one data point in a much longer negotiation, one that started well before any customer saw a hoarding go up. Brian O’Hoski, Vice President of Retail Operations at Cadillac Fairview, started his retail career at Sears before joining Cadillac Fairview, where he has spent close to two decades. He was Property Manager at CF Toronto Eaton Centre in the years before its current wave of activity, then held the same role at CF Sherway Gardens, followed by General Manager postings at CF Masonville Place and CF Rideau Centre, before taking on his current role overseeing the company’s entire retail portfolio in 2024.
“When we sit down with a global brand, we are presenting Toronto against the rest of the world,” he said. “These companies are not thinking about opening ten stores across Canada and calling it done. They are weighing a store in Toronto against a store in Dubai. It’s global competition, and it means we need to be at the table early. These deals take years, not months.”
Flying Tiger’s own timeline reflects that patience. A decade of quiet interest, a franchise relationship with Fox Group dating back to 2022, and only now a store on the floor. “Fox Group is one of the best operators we work with anywhere,” Mikkelsen said. “Given their presence in Canada with Nike and Mango, they were the natural partner for us. We know them, we know what they stand for, and after five years together, they know our brand just as well.”
That kind of positioning comes at a price, and O’Hoski doesn’t pretend otherwise. “This is an expensive property to be in,” he said. “The kind of exposure and the kind of sales volume you get here comes with a cost.” Cadillac Fairview owns thirteen of the country’s largest shopping centres, and O’Hoski is candid that not every brand belongs at this one first. “For some retailers, the right move is to begin their Canadian story at Toronto Eaton Centre, where the recognition and the backing are there from day one. For others, we have properties where they can test the market a little differently.” The conversation, he added, works best when it starts long before a lease is on the table. “There are certain sizes and certain areas of this mall that just aren’t available at a given moment, and it can take time to create the right solution. The earlier a brand is willing to talk, even before there’s a real need, the better position everyone is in when the timing lines up.”
Flying Tiger landed at the intersection of the second-level escalators and the path to the Urban Eatery, inside a building that draws more than 50 million visitors a year. It is exactly the kind of spot O’Hoski points to when explaining what makes this mall different from the rest of the portfolio. “At this mall, you can see the same customer three times in a single day. Before work, at lunch, and again on the way home,” he said. “A brand that gives that customer a reason to stop in each time is exactly what this property is built for.”
It arrived alongside a run of other decisions made independently, over years, by companies with no relationship to one another. RW&CO relocated into a reimagined 9,800-square-foot flagship this spring. POP MART opened a Level 1 store last week in the former Call It Spring space. LEGO is building its first downtown Toronto store on Level 3, after years of shoppers making do with locations at Yorkdale and CF Fairview. Aritzia completed a major flagship expansion, Nike opened its Canadian flagship alongside Eataly and Simons in the former Nordstrom, Browns will be expanding its footprint with a new Level 2 destination, and Victoria’s Secret is rebuilding its space entirely.
Some of the most telling moves haven’t involved a new name at all. Skechers, long settled into one of the property’s prime spots, is using that position as leverage rather than staying put, a strategic pivot to a new location rather than a renewal. Kiokii is doing something similar one floor up, relocating just around the corner from its current spot into the former Disney Store on Level 2, an upgrade made possible only after Disney shuttered its retail chain entirely. Both moves depend on the same mechanic driving much of the activity at CF Toronto Eaton Centre right now: as one tenant moves or exits, the next one in line trades up, and the reshuffling ripples through the building.
The numbers back up the momentum. According to ICSC’s 2025 Canadian Mall Property Performance data, CF Toronto Eaton Centre closed the year at $1,642 in sales per square foot, the second-highest figure of any shopping centre in the country behind Yorkdale Shopping Centre, and an increase of $139 per square foot over 2024, among the largest year-over-year gains of any major property on the list. The mall’s 529,766 square feet of leasable retail space now hold 250 stores. Cadillac Fairview manages thirteen of the properties on that national ranking, exactly the range O’Hoski cited when describing where a brand like Flying Tiger could have chosen to start instead.
O’Hoski has been doing this long enough to know that the ceiling for a property like this isn’t something anyone can call in advance. “You look at brands like Lululemon and Aritzia doing the kind of numbers they’re doing today, and neither one looked anything like this five years ago,” he said. “It’s always a question of how high is up. We keep thinking we’ve built as much as we can, and then something like this comes along.”
None of that changes what O’Hoski sees as the property’s real competition ahead, and it isn’t another mall. Directly beneath CF Toronto Eaton Centre, crews have been excavating the future Queen Station for the Ontario Line since tunnelling began this spring, boring beneath a building that already sits above one of the busiest transit junctions in the country. When it opens, the station will connect directly into the mall alongside the existing Line 1 subway stop, giving CF Toronto Eaton Centre two subway lines running through it instead of one. Metrolinx projects close to 400,000 daily trips on the line once it’s running, with Queen among its busiest transfer points. The opening is projected for 2031.
For O’Hoski, that timeline isn’t a footnote, it’s the next chapter of the same argument he’s been making about the property all along. A mall that already draws 50 million visitors a year, sitting on top of what will soon be two subway lines instead of one, is not a property planning to hold steady.
“It’s hard to believe that, as the busiest mall in North America, we’re planning for even more traffic,” he said. “But here we are. The bar keeps moving, and we keep meeting it.”
Mikkelsen had one day in Toronto before flying back to Copenhagen, and he spent part of it standing near a lineup that hadn’t existed in the country a week earlier, for a store built on the idea that Canadians had already been finding their way to Flying Tiger long before Flying Tiger found its way to them.
“Seeing the joy and the excitement, even in the faces of people waiting, I think says it all,” he said. “We have five stores opening over the next couple of months, but Canada could be a hundred-store market for us. There’s no ceiling in a market like this.”
Dustin Fuhs is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 6ix Retail, Toronto’s premier source for retail and hospitality industry news. As the former Editor-in-Chief of Retail Insider, Canada’s most-read retail trade publication, Dustin brings over two decades of expertise spanning retail, marketing, entertainment and hospitality sectors. His experience includes roles with industry giants such as The Walt Disney Company, The Hockey Hall of Fame, The Canadian Opera Company, Starbucks Canada and Blockbuster.
Recognized as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert in 2024, 2025 and 2026, Dustin delivers insider perspectives on Toronto’s evolving retail landscape, from emerging brands to established players reshaping the city’s commercial districts.