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If Taylor Cross can make an 80-year-old man feel at home in one of her shops, she’s done her duty to Saskatoon’s downtown.
“That’s the goal,” she said, seated at a vintage family heirloom table in the “staff only” portion of one of her shops, The Clubhouse.
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“Once you have that happen, you can’t unfeel that feeling when a grandpa, the dad and the son all find banger pieces that they didn’t think that they would find.
“Same with moms, daughters and grandmas,” she said. “That happens at the boutique almost every Sunday.”
Cross, the 31-year-old founder and CEO of the Seven Sundays vintage clothing boutique in Saskatoon, spent nearly a decade working in insurance before deciding to do something different in 2022.
Shortly after, her partner came to the same realization and pivoted from medical school to business school.
Out of that decision came Seven Sundays. The business opened the doors of its first location on 2nd Avenue in its newly-renovated space beside Shelter Brewing in summer 2023.
“I feel like it was everything that we were manifesting coming to fruition,” Cross said, despite the quick turnaround time on her passion project.
The shop, originally intended to be a vintage clothing shop and cat cafe, is a culmination of some of Cross’s deepest joys in life.
Fashion and vintage have always held a place in Cross’s life and heart. The child of teen parents, Cross said they didn’t usually have the means or resources to buy things new. In her own teenage years, she turned to thrift stores to keep up with the fashions her friends were wearing, but also as a form of therapy.
“Shopping to me and finding unique pieces is kind of like a treasure hunt,” Cross said.
“I would put my headphones in when I needed a break from studying or whatever throughout the years of high school and found a real love for refurbishing and finding pieces that a lot of people wouldn’t look at twice.”
Cross started getting compliments on her style and the pieces she would source. Friends started asking her to go thrifting with them.
Now, in a sense, she gets to go thrifting with all of her customers.
Cross said she realized the second-hand and sustainable clothing market is not going anywhere. If anything, it’s becoming more popular.
“I just came to the realization that everything we want in the world already exists. It just takes someone having a certain eye and a certain taste to turn something old and used into something beautiful,” she shared.
Seven Sundays on 2nd Avenue sells women’s vintage, while a second location — The Clubhouse on 3rd Avenue — sells men’s and unisex vintage, will soon open a vintage reseller space called Second Story Market.
Cross has dubbed the first location “The Clubhouse’s cool older sister.”
The front entrance of The Clubhouse in downtown Saskatoon on March 5, 2026. Only blocks away from the original Seven Sundays boutique on 2nd Avenue, Cross said her goal is to oversaturate the downtown, where she feels the heart of the city lives. (Libby Gray/650 CKOM)
An oasis for shopping secondhand
Cross said she hopes that people of all ages can find something they love at her business.
“I think the older generation is just shocked that we’re selling something in there that they would have once had or loved,” she said with a smile.
“It’s typically the moms and grandmas being like, ‘No way. Why did I get rid of that? This is still cool?’ And I’m like, ‘I promise you, it’s still cool.’”
Being from Saskatoon, Cross saw a gap in the city’s downtown marketplace. She said she always wanted something like the shops she has now created.
“I always wanted an oasis to go and be able to shop secondhand, but I wanted to feel like I was in a big city or something out of a Pinterest board,” she said, adding she wanted a big city-feeling shop on the outside, but the nostalgic feeling of walking into a familiar, hometown space inside.
Cross said she must have music playing over the speakers in her shops at all times and has sourced their Clubhouse location decor nearly completely from family heirlooms.
Cross wanted customers to walk in and feel like their friends are working at the store.
“We really make it a point to train our staff to treat people how we want to make them feel and really put a lot of emphasis and importance on the interactions that we’re having with customers on a daily basis, and not just providing that surface level retail experience,” she explained.
“We both came to this realization that so many people our age were trying to leave Saskatoon, we’re trying to find ways to get out,” Cross said.
“And we were both kind of looking at each other like we’re both trying to find reasons to stay.”
Partnership born in Saskatoon
Cross runs the business with her partner, Sam Murphy. The two share a very Saskatchewan love story: both Saskatoon-born and met in the first grade, the reconnected again in their twenties, both having moved away from and back to Saskatchewan with the desire to find a way to stay in the province that felt most like home to them.
“We see so much potential in Saskatoon, especially our downtown core, that we just want to make it as cool as we can,” Cross said.
Cross and Murphy’s relationship was a big part of the name behind the brand.
After pivoting from The Collective Shop, thanks to feedback from an honest friend who called it “lame,” Cross came up with Seven Sundays.
She shared seven is an important number to her and Murphy for various reasons — one of which being it was the age she and Murphy met. Sundays have become her safe place through Murphy’s family, a day they spend all together and a bright spot in every week for Cross.
“When people come into our store, I want them to feel that feeling, like they can sit, they can browse, they can stay as long as they want,” she said, calling it a “low pressure feeling.”
The name, Cross said, is what convinced Murphy to partner with her on the business and go all-in on the project.
“He explains it as he zoomed in and his whole life flashed before his eyes,” Cross said, remembering telling him her idea for the name. “He was like, ‘That could be a global brand one day.’”
It can be challenging working with her partner, Cross shared, but said they’ve figured out how to stay in their own, specialized lanes of the business — Cross handling all the front-facing, retail, store and social media duties and Murphy taking care of backend operations, custom merch and managing wholesale partnerships.
It’s made for a very natural business flow, Cross said, and one that’s needed with the various enterprises Seven Sundays has taken on.
American singer-songwriter HARDY stopped by the Seven Sundays shop ahead of his Saskatoon tour stop on Feb. 12, 2026. He performed wearing a hat from the local boutique. (Seven Sundays/Instagram)
Finding local success, and beyond
The business began as a vintage boutique but has grown to encompass two downtown storefronts — which Cross said she could simply not pass up — a warehouse, a clothing line, wholesale to retailers across Saskatchewan and Western Canada, hosting other resellers, an online site and custom merch services.
Orders are even coming in from as far as the Maritimes, B.C. and the U.S.
Recently, American singer-songwriter, HARDY, stopped in at Seven Sundays ahead of his Saskatoon show last month. He bought a hat, which he wore that night at the SaskTel Centre and at various tour stops since. When he performed wearing it in Calgary, Cross said they noticed a number of orders coming in on their website.
“I didn’t know he was HARDY until after he left,” Cross said.
Seven Sundays welcomed American singer-songwriter HARDY in their shop in Saskatoon ahead of his SaskTel performance on Feb. 12, 2026. They shared the experience to their Instagram stories after he wore one of the brand’s hats onstage for the performance. (Seven Sundays/Instagram)
“We could have gotten zero orders that night, and we still would have been the happiest on Earth, because we’re getting exposure and people are seeing our stuff.”
Cross said the pair started in 2023 with very little and the pair puts every cent they earn back into their business’s growth and expansion.
Their marketing strategies — from authentic-feeling social media posts to partnerships with other local brands and shop events that one might expect to find in a big city — has helped grow their brand to where it’s not uncommon to spot a signature Seven Sundays hat or crewneck while out and about in Saskatoon.
‘If you want to feel that community feeling and there’s no one around you creating it, you have to create it for yourself,” Cross said.
The brand has invested in its own embroidery machine and offers customized crewnecks and hats, which the Seven Sundays team will design alongside their customers.
In its first six months of offering the service, Cross said they had more than 100 orders, despite trying to start slow and keep interest at bay. They also had to stop taking custom orders for the first few months of 2026 because there was such an overwhelming interest in the service.
“We want to be intentional with every single collaboration we do, and I feel like we’ve been able to do that,” Cross explained.
Now with 15 employees, Cross said they’re back taking orders and gaining popularity. The business has already collaborated with various local sports teams, businesses, supplied bachelorette parties and recently created a line for the pediatrics unit at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital.
“Saskatoon loves to support a local brand and business, so I think it’s been fun to be able to branch out into all these different niches,” Cross shared. “We just felt like we had so much more to offer than just vintage.”
Cross continues to feel that way. She spoke of plans to put an affordable juice, smoothie and coffee bar in their Clubhouse location on 3rd Avenue, perhaps as early as this summer – an opportunity to enhance the downtown commuter experience. She hopes to have local grandmothers and bakers supply pastries for sale, too.
“A lot of people will come down on their way home from work and pop into the boutique to stop by and pick up a gift or just browse around … to see what we’ve got in that’s new,” Cross explained.
“I think it is something that if you create a safe space and a fun environment for people to shop a certain way, they’re going (to).”
Though not opposed to future expansion, Cross said there aren’t plans at this time for another location. If and when that next opportunity opens, however — in Saskatoon or elsewhere — she wants to keep it in the heart of the city.
“I want to be a block away from the mall, I want to smell the river,” Cross said, only half joking.
A local leader in the making
“I never thought I would be here, to be honest with you,” Cross said of her fairly new position as a female entrepreneur and leader in Saskatoon, “but it’s also the most natural feeling ever.”
She said being invited to events, earning awards for their business and being invited to speak have been incredible experiences, through which she has felt the support of the Saskatoon entrepreneur and business community.
“I feel the overarching conversation when you’re a young female entrepreneur is you need to learn how to hold your own in big rooms,” Cross shared, adding that she wants to encourage women like her to trust themselves.
“All the confidence and strength and inner fortitude you need to do whatever you want to do is right inside,” she said.
“I’ve been in rooms where I’ve been asked to speak and been the only speaker and the most important person in the room didn’t know who I was,” Cross shared.
“I am learning that you’re just going to be treated like a 30-year-old girl sometimes in a room, regardless of what you’ve done. And that’s okay.”
Cross still can’t believe she’s doing her dream job around fantastic people every day.
“We are having so much fun, we get to go to work everyday and wear what we want, hang out with puppies, talk to people about clothes, and post on Instagram,” she shared.
“What could be better?”
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