Canada’s Hudson’s Bay opens first overseas store in Amsterdam

Canada’s iconic department store chain Hudson’s Bay opened its very first overseas store Tuesday in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam.

Nine other stores will open across the Netherlands this month, with locations in The Hague and Rotterdam due to fling wide their doors for the first time on Thursday.

It was “an historic moment” in the company’s “347-year history,” said chief executive officer Jerry Storch, adding it marked “the first Hudson’s Bay store ever to open outside of Canada and adding a new market to our diverse geographic footprint”.

The Canadian company, incorporated in 1670 and built up on the fur trade, appears to be bucking a trend seen on Dutch shopping streets in recent years where a number of large chains have been shuttered.

Hudson’s Bay is taking over stores previously occupied by the now-defunct Dutch chain Vroom & Dreesmann.

Once the country’s biggest department store chain after being founded in 1887, V&D declared bankruptcy in late 2015 after years of losses and finally shut down several months later.

Storch vowed in a statement the Amsterdam store would “deliver a fun and modern shopping experience” adding there had been “an unmet demand for a premium department store” in The Netherlands.