Giant Tiger Brand Guidelines: The Ottawa Discount Chain From a 1961 ByWard Market Store

A travelling salesman’s idea for Canada.

Giant Tiger began with one shop in Ottawa. The first store opened in May 1961 on George Street in the city’s ByWard Market, CTV News reported in May 2021, when the chain marked 60 years, and that store was still trading at the time. English Wikipedia gives the exact opening date as 13 May 1961. The founder was Gordon Reid, whom CBC News described in February 2017 as a travelling salesman who had seen discount stores in the United States and believed the Canadian market was ripe for something similar.

English Wikipedia fills in the background. In the late 1940s Reid travelled for an importer in the American Midwest, where he saw the new discount stores and was struck by one chain based in Cleveland, Ohio; he also cited the five-and-dime chain of F. W. Woolworth as an influence. His own retail experience had been in department stores.

The start was slow. First-year sales were far lower than Reid had hoped, English Wikipedia says, and by the end of 1962 he decided to close the store — but the crowds drawn by the closing-down sale kept the business going. A second store opened in Brockville, Ontario, in 1965, and by the tenth anniversary, in 1971, there were still only six.

The change came in 1968, when the first franchised Giant Tiger opened in Maniwaki, Quebec, run by a local owner who chose the site, did the advertising and stocked the shelves for his own customers. Franchised stores now make up the majority of locations, English Wikipedia says, and store managers are given wide leeway to order what sells in their own towns.

Friendly the tiger, and the names it trades under.

Giant Tiger sells a broad mix in a small space. CBC News reported in 2017 that its stores were relatively small for a department store, “not quite the size of a Canadian football field,” and carried housewares, groceries, fashion and hardware, with brand names such as Hanes, Crayola and Energizer on the shelves; the company would not say how much of its merchandise was sourced offshore, saying only that it varied by department. CTV News in 2021 described it as a Canadian-owned family discount store carrying everything from clothing to groceries and household goods, and noted that it had expanded its online store.

Thomas Haig, then president, told CBC News in 2017 that its buyers looked for name-brand deals and that its smaller stores let shoppers get in and out quickly.

Its public face is an animal. The chain’s mascot is a tiger called Friendly the Giant Tiger, who, CTV News reported in 2021, makes hundreds of appearances at community events.

The chain trades under several names. In Quebec its stores are called Tigre Géant, the French form of the name. English Wikipedia records other banners: Chez Tante Marie stores in Hull and Gatineau from 1977, which were later closed or rebranded as Tigre Géant, the last in 2017; Scott’s Discount, launched in 1996 for smaller stores; and GT Xpress, first opened in 2008 in Ottawa’s Hintonburg neighbourhood as a smaller inner-city format with more fresh food.

Behind the stores sits its own logistics. English Wikipedia says the company started its own trucking fleet in 1987, moved its head office in 1996 into a former Sears Canada distribution centre on Walkley Road in Ottawa, and opened a large distribution centre in 2018 at Johnstown, Ontario, at the junction of Highways 401 and 416, roughly halfway between Montreal and Toronto.

Banners, own labels and loyalty.

Canadian retail identities are often built in layers: a parent group, a set of store banners, and the own-label ranges that sit on their shelves. Loblaw Companies is a clear example. English Wikipedia describes it as running corporate and franchise supermarkets under 22 regional and market-segment banners, from the full-service Loblaws to the discount No Frills and Maxi, each with its own sign, store format and tone of voice.

Own labels carry much of the visual identity. Loblaw’s No Name range arrived in 1978 in plain yellow packaging, and its President’s Choice line followed in the mid-1980s with photography-led packs, according to the International Directory of Company Histories. Loblaw’s apparel label, Joe Fresh, began in 2006, English Wikipedia says. Loyalty schemes and flyers do similar work: Loblaw’s PC Optimum points programme runs across its grocery and pharmacy banners, and when No Frills built a 2020 campaign around shopper types, Canadian Grocer reported, one of them was a deal hunter who searches the weekly digital flyer before she shops.

Quebec adds a language layer. Some national chains trade under French names there: Shoppers Drug Mart has used the Pharmaprix banner in the province since its first Quebec store in 1972, Loblaw’s own history says, and Loblaw entered the Quebec grocery market in 1998 by buying the Quebec-based chain Provigo, whose name it kept.

Corporate pages tell the rest of the story. Groups such as Loblaw publish timelines of founders and acquisitions, investor pages and lists of banners, and these are useful for dates and ownership; this guide presents them as the company’s own account, alongside encyclopaedias, trade press and regulators. The brands that follow range from century-old grocers to fashion chains, and each is described by what the sources show about its names, formats and labels.

From six stores in 1971 to more than 260.

The chain grew east to west. In 2001 Giant Tiger signed a master franchise agreement with The North West Company to open its stores in western Canada, English Wikipedia says, and in March 2020 North West announced that it would sell 34 of its 46 Giant Tiger franchises back to the company. A single store in Potsdam, New York, its only one in the United States, opened in 2004 and closed in 2009.

Its store count has changed over time. CBC News put the chain at 200 stores in February 2017, with stores in every province except British Columbia and Newfoundland, and reported that it had taken over one former Target Canada site after Target left the country in 2015. By May 2021 it had more than 260 locations across Canada and employed roughly 10,000 people, according to CTV News. Not every store stays open: in July 2026 a company spokesperson confirmed to CBC News the closure of its store at Donald Street and Ellice Avenue in downtown Winnipeg, without giving a reason.

Giant Tiger Stores Limited is based in Ottawa, and CTV News described it in 2021 as Canadian-owned and family-run. English Wikipedia says that key head-office staff were made co-owners from early on — by 1980 ownership was shared between Reid and ten employees, an idea he credited to Canada’s agricultural co-operative movement.

For a design guide, Giant Tiger shows how a discount chain can lean on a single character and a bilingual name to feel local in small towns. Compare Walmart, which, the chain’s then president told CBC in 2017, has stores in most of the places where Giant Tiger trades, and Canadian Tire, another Canadian general-merchandise chain built on locally run stores. For this guide we use a tiger orange, a warm yellow and near-black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Giant Tiger’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.