It's a nondescript one-storey building just off the Georgia Street viaduct on Vancouver’s Terminal Avenue. There’s no sign on the dark grey exterior to say what lies inside; a sign on the edge of the property states only the building’s address number: 865.
Above the loading bay doors, there’s a relief of a skull and crossbones, adorned with a crown.
“People sometimes come to the door and ask what’s in this building,” said Sid Dickens, the owner of the building and Sid Dickens Inc. “I’ve said all kinds of things.”
For the past 10 years, Dickens has quietly run his 20-year-old business out of the 25,000-square-foot building on Terminal Avenue; his neighbours are warehouses, big-box stores and car dealerships.
Sid Dickens Inc. makes one product: six-by-eight-inch decorative tiles Dickens has trademarked Memory Blocks. The small pieces of art sell for $92 each and are in more than 500 stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe and Asia.
The company would not disclose exactly how much of its product it ships each year but said it was in six figures.
“I enjoy business as much as I enjoy art,” Dickens said. “I’m kind of an odd duck because I don’t really fit.”
“I can go into the artist community and I don’t really fit, and I can go to the business community and I really don’t fit.”
Dickens grew up in Prince Rupert, the son of a commercial fisherman. In 1983, when he was 19, he moved to Vancouver to go to art school. But he found it difficult to imagine making a living as an artist, and for several years he split his time between Vancouver and working on his father’s fishing boat on the north coast.
“It wasn’t looked on as a profession,” Dickens said of being an artist.
“I never really believed at that point in my life – in my youth – that I would be able to make a living as an artist, because nobody believed that.”
In the late 1980s, he started reducing the size of his paintings, for practical reasons: he shared a tiny Gastown studio with two other artists, and small pieces were easier to fit in stores.
“I had a good friend who owned Liberty Design and another friend who owned a store on Robson Street. They encouraged me to do stuff to sell in stores, so that’s what I pursued.”
Then a client visiting from Hong Kong noticed the small pieces of wood displaying different paint colours and design ideas Dickens had put up on his studio wall. She asked if he could create 400 similar pieces to decorate a new hotel in China.
After shipping the completed tiles, Dickens had 90 left over, which he displayed in Liberty Design. They sold out in two days.
“It got me thinking about the small things, because I had already been getting smaller and smaller,” Dickens said. “This focused me on thinking about things you can hang on the wall and be interactive with.”
The sleek lobby and front offices of Sid Dickens Inc. are filled with comfortable leather couches and custom-made wooden desks. Down a hallway, the building opens up to the manufacturing space in the back. It’s cleanup day and Dickens raises his voice to be heard above the M.I.A. song (Bad Girls) blasting through a speaker. Aproned workers bend over tables filled with tiles.
Sid Dickens Inc. employs 40 people, many of whom have been with the company for years, and all its production is done in-house.
“We ask for artists, some kind of arts background. Most of our younger employees have that,” Dickens said. “The older ones have been with our company almost since its existence; they just know it by learning.”
Around a corner, another hallway leads to Dickens’ inner sanctum: a large, high-ceilinged office sparsely furnished with a desk, a sitting area and yet more tables covered with tiles. It’s where Dickens does most of his design work when he’s in Vancouver, which is rarely: he spends much of his time at the house, studio and large garden he built on Haida Gwaii.
Dickens describes his younger self as painfully shy; he’d often stay in the car while his partner, Greg Mah, made deals with store owners. He no longer finds talking to people so difficult, but he loves the isolation of Moresby Island, which is two ferry rides away from the mainland.
“I looked at other places: Tofino, the Gulf Islands,” Dickens said. “They weren’t far enough away.”
“I find the city has gotten very difficult for me to live in. It’s got a lot of razzle-dazzle.”
Dickens is now focused on bringing the business back up to where it was before the 2008 financial crisis. In its aftermath, Dickens’ business dropped by about 30% as retailers struggled.
The traditional customers have been middle-aged women, and Dickens is now working on designs that appeal to their daughters – a generation with a different design sensibility.
“I’m doing more vintage, retro colours, more vintage graphics,” Dickens said, contrasting the new designs to his “Gothic, Renaissance or medieval” sensibilities.
The company releases two collections a year of 10 to 12 tiles.
“We retire certain pieces every year, and we never make them again,” said company general manager Maryann Raj. “That’s part of the business model.”
That’s made the discontinued tiles highly desirable collector’s items among Sid Dickens fans. Some are sold among collectors for up to $5,000.
From the beginning, Dickens also created a buffer zone around the stores that carried the tiles and will not place product in another store that is within 50 miles or a five-minute drive of the first store.
“That’s something that probably served me better over the long run than anything.”
Dickens added that his hardest business lesson was hiring a manager and delegating tasks he’d done on his own for 13 years.
“I could no longer create and run my company because I was so burned out. … The hardest piece of the puzzle was letting go of what I’d created for 10 years.”
Building up that infrastructure has left Dickens free to design – and garden – on bucolic Haida Gwaii while the company can run mostly on its own in busy Vancouver.
“I get recharged, remember why I’m doing this,” he said. •
