Renaud-Bray adds art materials to his portfolio.
The Renaud-Bray group announced Tuesday that it had acquired DeSerres, a century-old family business specializing in the sale of artistic materials.
Renaud-Bray thus gets its hands on the 28 DeSerres branches in Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and British Columbia, the company’s website, its subsidiary specializing in framing Cadres Verbec and Lamarche Importation, a distributor of stationery products which also belonged to DeSerres.
Known until the early 2010s under the name of Omer DeSerres, the retail business was founded in 1908 by the man whose name it bore when he purchased an ironworks that he had converted into a hardware store. Omer DeSerres had opened other branches over the years, specializing in plumbing and heating parts, and his son Roger would eventually create a chain of department stores selling a little bit of everything, from sporting goods to small appliances.
The shift toward artistic materials began in the 1950s when the Montreal School of Applied Arts was moved near the Omer DeSerres branch in the city’s downtown core. This niche was to become over time its main field of activity.
Marc DeSerres, grandson of the founder, affirmed in a press release that “the time has come for me to hand over the baton and I do so with complete confidence”. He says he is certain to see Renaud-Bray “sustaining the freedom to create”, as he puts it.
The Renaud-Bray group brings together the Renaud-Bray bookstores, the Archambault stores, the Griffon toy stores, the Prologue book distributor and the Pierre Belvédère toy distributor. The group has 91 branches.
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