Cowichan Valley-Based Family Business Boutique Paint Products Popular Across North America
The family behind Country Chic Paint, from left: Rosalynn, Jan and Rosanne Korteland, Alyssa and Joshua.
DUNCAN – For Jan and Rosanne Korteland, it was black and white: Their new company would be bursting with colour.
When the couple started Country Chic Paint in 2014, they wanted to build more than a regular business for their family. They wanted to create colourful boutique furniture paint that would brighten homes everywhere, and gave them names like Vanilla Frosting, Cheesecake, Pop The Bubbly, Road Trip, Cut A Rug and Yellow Wellies.
“I like Paint The Town, which is a red colour,” says Rosanne. “I thought that was one of the clever ones.”
Today, Country Chic Paint offers one of the largest selections of furniture paint products in North America, as well as waxes, glazes, tools and other decorative finishes, which are available through over 600 retailers. All of the paints are manufactured in their facility in Whippletree Junction on the Trans-Canada Highway, where 16 employees make the paint, put it in 4, 16 and 32 ounce containers, and ship it to stores throughout Canada and the United States.
“We have customers all over North America, and we’re starting to sell a little bit overseas, but that’s not really our focus,” she notes. “We’re having a hard enough time keeping up as it is that we haven’t really gone into too much effort to expand beyond North America yet.
“Whippletree Junction is not a retail outlet,” she adds. “Occasionally people stop by to try and buy paint, but typically we send them to our retailers.”
The Kortelands emigrated to Canada from the Netherlands in 2008, where Rosanne finished her BA at the University of British Columbia before they moved to the Cowichan Valley in 2009.
“It was always our dream to end up on the Island,” she recalls. “We were expecting our first daughter when we arrived, and we never left.”
Starting their own small business was a natural step for the Kortelands, as Rosanne’s father was an entrepreneur, and Jan was running a bicycle store in the Netherlands with his parents in a true family business.
Country Chic Paint products are available through over 600 retailers.
The Kortelands started Zin Frames, which manufactured and wholesaled custom picture frames in different shapes, sizes and colours, shipping them across Canada.
“I think it was in our blood,” she notes. “I never even had a boss here in Canada, which some people say is not really recommended – to go to a new place and start your own business right away. But it worked out for us anyway.”
Country Chic Paint evolved from their frame business.
“We were custom painting all these frames, and eventually people said they wanted to paint them themselves. They wanted them raw and wanted to do the finishing,” she recalls. “One day I did a workshop and put two and two together with our paint supplier who we were buying an industrial product from that was not suitable for consumers.
“We put our heads together to find something that might work for our customers, and might be good for furniture and home décor and picture frames.”
They did and it is.
“What we tried to do set us apart from our competitors was having packaging that was geared towards women, as 95 per cent of our customers are women,” she explains. “We wanted to make a product for a specific customer who was doing their first Do-It-Yourself project, or painting furniture for a living. Our paint suited for a wide variety of experience levels.”
Rosanne notes that Country Chic Paint contains a built-in primer element that eliminates a lot of prep work before people start their projects.
“It adheres to a wide variety of surfaces, and our customers are looking for a paint they can leave really modern, or give it a distressed finish,” she says. “Our paint doesn’t cure hard right away, so there are a few days when you can do wet distressing, so it stays workable for a longer period of time. That’s also a big difference.”
Rosanne handles the marketing and customer service aspects of the business, and Jan looks after production and logistics, including the warehouse.
The naming of the paint colours is a team effort from staff.
“Over the years it’s become a collaborative effort between our team,” she states. “Some say it’s the best part of the job, coming up with the colour names, because it’s really fun. We narrow it down to whatever we think sounds best, and we have a lot of unique names.
“People say they really like our colour selection. When you go to a paint store there are thousands of choices, so it becomes really difficult for people to decide what they want to use. We narrowed it down to the paint colours that work for specific types of projects.”
Country Chic Paint products are also Zero VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds), which means they don’t harm the environment or health.
Business has grown steadily over the years, and really picked up during COVID, as more people invested in stay-at-home projects and renovations. In 2015, they had an opportunity through the Dragon’s Den television entrepreneurial investment program to have outside investors come in as partners, but decided against it.
“With Dragon’s Den we had six months of back and forth due diligence, but at that point we pulled out because we were not feeling like we were going to get what we came for,” she explains. “We were not necessarily interested for the money, but for the expertise and mentorship. Basically we would just have got money and that was it, plus reporting requirements. We could go to the bank and get the same thing, so it didn’t make sense.
It didn’t feel right.”
The program did air and Rosanne says there are still people who say they saw them on Netflix.
“It definitely helped us there publicity wise,” she says. “It was an interesting experience, and I definitely recommend it to people.”
Listening to their customers and staff have been keys to their success.
“We are always making sure we put their needs at the top of the list, as well as our team,” she states. “I think we have a really awesome team, and some of them have been with us since the beginning. And we have really solid relationships with suppliers that has really helped us.”
