Two Canadian e-commerce brands, Cymax Group Technologies and CommerceBear, appear to have shut down this year amidst tough market conditions.
This week, Vancouver Tech Journal noted that multiple employees from Burnaby, BC-based Cymax were looking for work and discussing the company’s shutdown on LinkedIn. This included a post from senior leader David Tse, who noted he was “helping the company with the wind-down.”
Bijan Vaez, the founder and CEO of Vancouver e-commerce company Merchkit, also posted about Cymax’s shutdown and said he would help connect affected employees to other players in the industry. Cymax did not respond to BetaKit’s attempts to confirm its shutdown, but did share Vaez’s post with the comment “Sharing for reach!” on its LinkedIn page
The number of employees affected by the shutdown remains unclear, but Cymax’s LinkedIn profile lists 145 associated members.
Cymax was founded in 2004 as a furniture marketplace and grew to include multichannel e-commerce platform Channel Gate and shipping management platform Freight Club. Channel Gate helped furniture vendors with e-commerce sales management, while Freight Club helped vendors and manufacturers with shipment quoting, booking, and tracking.
In 2024, Plenty of Fish founder and Cymax majority owner Markus Frind took over as CEO, saying at the time he was “stepping into this subsidiary to provide direction, vision and focus” shortly after former CEO Rizwan Somji left to spend time with his family.
RELATED: Majority owner Markus Frind named permanent CEO of Cymax Group
In his post, Vaez said he’s aware of many similar retail brands from furniture to consumer-packaged goods “having a hell of time” trying to manage their supply chains amidst the tariff dispute between Canada and the United States.
“Missing parts or ingredients needed for production. Not enough inventory to sell,” Vaez wrote. “There’s not much optimization to be had when the product keeps going out of stock and the marketplaces penalize you … all that effort gets wasted!”
Vaez’s post has since been edited to remove a mention of the similar recent closure of Toronto-based CommerceBear, referenced by Vancouver Tech Journal. BetaKit reached out to CommerceBear founder Sam Vlessing for comment, but did not hear back by press time. However, a source familiar with the company confirmed CommerceBear has shut down, and its website now delivers a 404 error.
CommerceBear was launched by Vlessing in 2019 to provide furniture manufacturers with an end-to-end e-commerce solution to sell their products on markets like Wayfair, Amazon, and Walmart. By 2022, the company had raised a total of $10.5 million USD from the likes of Garage Capital and Inovia to help it win more of the market and make e-commerce accessible to the entire furniture and home goods industry. Vlessing’s LinkedIn indicates he now works on the Labs team at Ottawa-based wellness platform Fullscript.
As Vaez noted, retail-associated businesses have faced economic headwinds and rising costs amidst the Canada-US trade war. However, the furniture market that both CommerceBear and Cymax specialized in has been particularly rocked by slowed growth after a consumer spending boom during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Feature image courtesy Cymax Group Technologies via LinkedIn.
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