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For 38 years, Boutique Endurance has been situated on a quiet street in Montreal’s Little Italy. You might miss it if you drive down the tree-lined residential street, resplendent with townhouses with colourful stairways leading to second-storey apartments. It’s one of the very few stores on the street, since zoning laws changed in the area. If it were ever to close, the building would revert to a residential building. Luckily, owners Pierre Léveillé and Christine Slythe’s son Gabriel Slythe-Léveillé is as passionate about running as his Olympian parents, and he has big plans for the future of the shop, both on and offline.
Lest you worry that Slythe-Léveillé was forced to take over the shop from his parents, it was actually running that he was most encouraged to pursue. It makes sense, considering his parents were Olympic hurdlers, competing in three Games between the two of them. “I had more pressure from running, since I did the 400m hurdles as well,” he says. In fact, he was national champion in 2019 and spent years training with an elite group in France before eventually retiring from professional racing. Now, he races for fun, and has become much more focusd on the business. It’s a big change from when he was five years old in his parent’s store, playing hide and seek among the boxes in the back.
“After 2020, running really blew up in Canada, so it was a nice opportunity to invest into the store,” he says. “I like that I’m still connected to everything that’s related to running, and I think I brought a younger vision to the store. We’ve made a lot of changes while keeping traditions alive, and we’re having a lot of success.”
One of his visions was improving Boutique Endurance’s online footprint, both on their website and social media. He’s started to create unique video content to highlight new drops from running brands, using store employees as the runners and the streets and tracks of Montreal as the backdrop. “We wanted organic content, rather than just working with the assets that the brand sends us,” he says. “We’ve got our own flavour.”
How did he convince his dad to invest in such a big change? Simple: by recruiting him to be one of the models in the videos. (The resulting sales after the first few videos he and their videographer produced helped, too.)
The store has not pivoted to online-only, however–they still host plenty of IRL events for the community. “We have a running club that’s been around for 15 years,” Slythe-Léveillé says. “We train every Wednesday and Sunday morning, and usually 80 to 90 people show up.”
They also host more open social runs, often with involvement from a running brand and a local restaurant or brewery. And since 2020, more and more new runners have shown up.
“It’s even crazier now than it was in 2020,” he says. “I feel like running starts as an individual sport, but people eventually start looking for something more social.”
While the location of the store makes it a bit less easy to access for someone who’s just window shopping, that actually works to Boutique Endurance’s advantage: when someone walks in the door, they’re there because they’re in need of something to improve their running. And the staff are ready to help.
Beyond just selling a multitude of shoes, apparel and accessories from well-known running brands and smaller, more niche brands, Boutique Endurance also has coaches and kinesiologists offering services to help runners improve their stride. And because running is the only sport that Boutique Endurance focuses on, there is no question about running that they can’t answer.
“We get asked if we would like to move somewhere with more action, but that’s not the core of our business,” says Slythe-Léveillé. And he’s right: walking into Endurance Boutique feels like making a discovery, finding a hidden gem in the city—and trust me, it makes you want to start shopping.
