In 2025, looking for an ambitious challenge and the opportunity to collaborate with some of the sharpest minds in ecommerce and retail, I joined Canadian Tire Corporation, working on in-store media platforms at national scale.

Canadian Tire isn’t just another retailer. It’s one of the most structurally interesting systems in Canadian commerce.

Founded in 1922 as Hamilton Tire and Garage by brothers John and Alfred Billes, Canadian Tire evolved from a local auto shop into a national institution by doing something deceptively simple: serving real needs, repeatedly, at scale.

Over the decades, the company expanded far beyond automotive—into home, sport, outdoor living, industrial workwear, and essentials—while pioneering ideas that quietly shaped modern retail:

• The dealer-store model
• Early loyalty mechanics through Canadian Tire Money
• A deep integration into the daily lives of Canadian families

Today, the corporation operates more than 1,700 retail and gasoline locations across the country, spanning Canadian Tire, SportChek, Mark’s, Gas+, and related banners.

This is retail infrastructure embedded into Canadian life.

What truly differentiates Canadian Tire is its dealer model.

Dealers aren’t traditional franchisees bound by rigid corporate mandates. They are entrepreneurial operators empowered to adapt their stores to local conditions—regional demand, community needs, and real-world constraints.

This flexibility isn’t chaos. It’s designed autonomy.

The Billes brothers understood something many modern organizations forget: systems scale better when intelligence is distributed. By embedding entrepreneurship directly into the organizational structure, Canadian Tire unlocked a form of optimization that benefits dealers, customers, and the corporation as a whole.

Layer that dealer model onto Canadian Tire Corporation’s multi-banner real estate portfolio, and something unusual emerges: one of the most distinctive retail media ecosystems in the country.

Each banner has its own behavioral logic:

🛠️ Canadian Tire

Shoppers often arrive in moments of urgency. A broken part. A failed appliance. A tool needed now. Amazon can’t help when time is the constraint.

⛸️ SportChek

Trips may be less frequent, but baskets are large and intentional. Customers touch, test, compare, and linger—skates, bikes, skis, footwear, apparel. High dwell time. High consideration.

👕 Mark’s

Where workwear meets everyday life—utility, durability, and function.

⛽ Gas+

Captures moments of transit, routine, and convenience.

Together, these banners create a rare blend of urgency, exploration, loyalty, and premium demographics—including highly active, high-income households and the next generation being outfitted for sports and outdoor life.

From a systems perspective, this is gold.

At the heart of the work is a fascinating coordination problem: how to align traditional retail disciplines—merchandising, supply chain, store operations—with modern media systems designed to deliver measurable, incremental value.

The goal isn’t ads for the sake of ads.

It’s to build next-generation planning tools that:

• Serve dealers
• Support merchants
• Create value for brands
• Improve the customer journey
• Transform physical retail into a genuinely omnichannel media experience

Retail media sits at the intersection of user experience, data, incentives, and outcomes—which is exactly where the most interesting systems live.

Retail media is one of the most dynamic spaces in modern commerce because it forces clarity.

Everything is measurable. Everything has trade-offs. Every decision touches people, profit, and experience at once.

For someone obsessed with how systems actually behave under pressure, Canadian Tire offers a rare opportunity: a century-old institution actively evolving its architecture without losing its soul.

That kind of system is worth studying from the inside.