Leon’s Brand Guidelines: The 1909 Welland Store Behind a Canadian Furniture Group

A store on the Welland Canal.

Leon’s began in Welland, Ontario, a town on the Welland Canal in the Niagara Region, close to the United States border. English Wikipedia says it was founded by Ablan Leon, a Lebanese immigrant who worked in a factory and then as a door-to-door salesman before opening a store with his profits in 1909. The company’s own history calls the business the A. Leon Company and describes a general merchandise store selling soft goods such as trousers, blankets, shoes and linens; English Wikipedia describes it as a dry goods outlet that later turned to furniture.

The company tells that turn through a family story. A mattress bought as a wedding present for one of Ablan Leon’s sons was left leaning against the store’s outside wall, a customer asked to buy it, and the margin on that one sale showed how much more larger items could earn, the company says. It presents this as its own account of how the shop moved into furniture.

The family ran the store. The company says the children worked in it from a young age, and that in 1942 the business passed to Ablan Leon’s children, who added to the Welland building and then opened stores elsewhere in southwestern Ontario, all under the Leon’s name.

Toronto came next. Rather than open new stores there, the company says, the family bought an established retailer and later traded under its own name; English Wikipedia says it bought several established outlets in the city and converted them to the Leon’s name. The business went public in 1969 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, with the family keeping majority ownership, the company says, and English Wikipedia says the Leon family still holds the controlling interest, while the remaining shares trade on the Toronto exchange under the symbol LNF. In Quebec, English Wikipedia gives the listed company’s name as Meubles Léon Limité.

Warehouse showrooms and franchised towns.

In 1973 Leon’s opened its first warehouse showroom. The company describes a 150,000-square-foot building that kept large stocks of furniture under the same roof as the showroom, and says it promoted the store on television, including a commercial that used a helicopter to show the size of the building. Larger showrooms across Canada followed, the company says.

Leon’s sells furniture, mattresses, major appliances and electronics. English Wikipedia describes the range as mainly mid-priced, with some discount lines and some higher-end showrooms. In June 2007 it launched the Urban Living Collection of smaller sofas, bedroom and dining sets for buyers in condominiums and smaller homes, English Wikipedia says. In Quebec the company trades as Meubles Léon.

The store network mixes ownership models. English Wikipedia says roughly half of the Leon’s stores are owned by the company and the rest, mainly in rural areas and smaller cities, are run by franchisees. The chain also tried the United States: it ran two stores in Arizona, opened in 1980 and 1990, and closed them in 1997 to concentrate on Canada, English Wikipedia says. In 2016 Leon’s took over eight former Sears Home locations, which gave it its first store in British Columbia.

Showrooms, flyers and corporate pages.

Furniture retail is a category built around the showroom. The chains in this group, from the north-eastern United States and the American South to Canada, Australia and France, sell sofas, beds, tables and storage from large stores where pieces are set out as rooms, so a customer can see a bedroom or a living room as a whole before choosing its parts.

Print came early. The International Directory of Company Histories describes an Atlanta furniture partnership of the 1880s and 1890s selling through illustrated newspaper advertisements and through salesmen who carried photographs of furniture styles from door to door. Catalogues, flyers and weekend sale pages followed in the twentieth century, and today the same chains publish websites with room planners and online showrooms alongside the stores.

Naming tends to be plain. Many of these businesses carry a founder’s surname, sometimes joined to another name after a merger or purchase, and ranges are often sold under the retailer’s own label as well as under manufacturers’ brands. Store formats are named just as directly: showrooms, outlets, clearance centres and mattress departments.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. Listed companies publish founding dates, stock-exchange listings and leadership changes for investors, while family-owned chains tell the same story through founders and generations. Purchases of one chain by another, and changes of owner, are usually dated there too. For a designer, the useful material is this mix of a long-running name, a room-set showroom and a steady flow of printed and digital promotions; the tones and typefaces in each guide here are our own reading of that, not an official system.

One listed parent, two chains.

The biggest change came in 2012 and 2013. On 11 November 2012 Leon’s announced that it would buy its rival The Brick, the Edmonton furniture chain, English Wikipedia says. The legal trade magazine Lexpert reported in July 2013 that Leon’s Furniture had completed the takeover, and that The Brick’s shares and share-purchase warrants ceased to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange from 1 April 2013. Leon’s has kept the two chains under their own names, each with its own stores and website, and The Brick keeps its head office in Edmonton.

Today the listed parent is Leon’s Furniture Limited, which also uses the name LFL Group. Its third-quarter 2025 report, approved on 6 November 2025, lists four retail banners — Leon’s, The Brick, Brick Outlet and The Brick Mattress Store — plus Midnorthern Appliance and Appliance Canada, which sell appliances to builders, developers, hotels and property management companies. The same report names a repair division, Trans Global Services, and two subsidiaries abroad: First Oceans Trading Corporation, which handles importing and quality control for products sourced in Asia, and King & State Limited in the Caribbean. It also lists six online stores, among them one for each of the two chains and a third trading as furniture.ca. English Wikipedia says the company has stores in every Canadian province.

The group’s warehouses are large. Real Estate News Exchange reported in October 2022 that its 870,000-square-foot distribution centre in Mississauga serves the Greater Toronto Area, that the group then held about 14 million square feet of owned and leased retail and distribution property across Canada, and that Leon’s was building a 500,000-square-foot distribution centre and office in Edmonton for The Brick with Qualico Properties; Qualico said the building opened in January 2025.

For a design guide, Leon’s shows how a family name over a small-town shop can carry a national group with two chains. Compare The Brick, part of the group since 2013, and Structube, another Canadian furniture retailer. For this guide we use a deep blue, sky blue and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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