How a Toronto Entrepreneur Turned Canada's Anti-Tariff Anger Into a Thriving Marketplace

When Donald Trump's tariff policy sparked a wave of Canadian economic nationalism, Valerie Crisp, a 38-year-old Toronto entrepreneur, saw an opening. She had already been quietly building a product-search prototype through a tech accelerator when the Buy Canadian movement exploded in early 2025. Rather than starting from scratch, she pivoted her existing tool into Common Goods, an online marketplace dedicated to Canadian brands — and posted a TikTok about the idea with no significant following. The timing did the work: signups poured in.

Common Goods launched with an affiliate model in February 2025, routing shoppers to Canadian brands' own checkout pages. By November, Crisp added curated gift boxes filled entirely with Canadian products, which sold strongly through the holiday season and gave her the momentum to bring more brands onto direct checkout. The site publishes "Buy Canadian" guides with top-10 and top-20 lists for categories where the right fit for direct retail doesn't exist, monetizing those through affiliate links regardless of whether the brand is stocked on Common Goods itself.

The business runs lean — Crisp is the sole full-time employee, bootstrapped with no outside funding or venture capital. But the political news cycle has become an unexpected growth engine. The morning after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that no trade deal with the United States had been reached, Crisp posted a few threads about shopping Canadian and watched daily site traffic spike from under 5,000 visitors to nearly 15,000 in a single day. One vendor emailed in a panic, convinced the sudden flood of orders must be fraudulent; Crisp had to reassure them it was real.

Bestselling categories include apparel, personal care, tea, and coffee — practical staples that new customers are comfortable committing to. Crisp is candid about the movement's limits, though: truly "made in Canada" is achievable for food and skincare but nearly impossible for electronics, and Canadian-made options often cost twice as much as imports, making strict Buy Canadian shopping a financial privilege not everyone can afford. Her marketplace therefore focuses on Canadian-owned businesses and lets shoppers filter from there based on their own priorities. The returning customer rate currently sits between 5% and 13%, well below her 20% target, but she notes most customers have only discovered the platform in the last six months.