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South Shore furniture, a Quebec-based furniture maker founded in 1940, is closing up shop.
The company, based in Sainte-Croix — a municipality on the southern bank of the Saint-Lawrence located about 60 kilometres southwest of Quebec City — said the closure was due to a drop in demand caused by cheap furniture from Asia and American tariffs.
The company sells a wide variety of ready-to-assemble furniture on its website, proudly touting its products as made from Quebec lumber.
But between 2022 and 2025, sales dropped 77 per cent, the company said in a news release on Monday.
“We’ve done everything we could to keep our business running and preserve jobs,” said Charles Laflamme, the CEO of South Shore Furniture, “but it has become impossible for us to continue operating in a market where World Trade Organization rules are not being followed.”
The company blamed the drop in sales on “Asian dumping and American tariffs.”
For years, it said in the release, cheap products from China and Vietnam have flooded the Canadian and American markets, lowering prices.
Then, recently, American tariffs on some Asian countries led companies there to try to redirect even more products to the Canadian market, lowering prices even further. Those tariffs also impacted the company’s sales to the U.S., it said.
“For Canadian manufacturers like South Shore Furniture, demand has simply dried up on both sides of the border,” the news release said.
In 2025, when President Donald Trump announced tariffs on Canadian goods, South Shore Furniture said it was laying off 115 employees. At the time, the company said 70 per cent of its sales were conducted in the U.S.
The company’s 126 employees were notified of the decision to cease operations on Monday.
South Shore Furniture was founded in 1940 by Eugène Laflamme. It operated out of a sawmill in Sainte-Croix and expanded to include a manufacturing facility in Coaticook, Que., which is also closing, and distribution centres in the U.S. in El Paso, Texas as well as Salt Lake City and Nashville.
The company said the closure was taking place despite its investments in modernizing its business. South Shore Furniture was early to embrace online shopping, creating a website for sales in 2004 and had made investments in automation and robotics.
