From big box to high tech: Ottawa siblings turn retail headache into growing tech company

March 12, 2026

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Elizabeth and Allan Malcomson spent years working the floor of their family’s Canadian Tire store in Kanata, watching customers wander around 90,000 square feet of retail space looking for help that never came. So they built a solution that combined their knowledge of retail with the latest in tech. The siblings are co-founders of Meerby, an Ottawa-based retail technology company whose flagship product uses smart call buttons, skill-based routing and real-time staff tracking to connect shoppers with the right employee in under 90 seconds. What started as an internal experiment at their family’s Canadian Tire store has grown into a commercially deployed platform running across eight retail banners in Canada and the United States. “We lived this problem every single day on the floor,” Allan said. “Customers were ready to buy and we were losing them, not because we didn’t have great people, but because we had no way to get the right person to the right customer at the right moment. That’s what drove us to build Meerby.” The Malcomsons are third-generation Canadian Tire operators. Their parents opened the Kanata store in 1996, and both siblings grew up taking on increasing responsibility from high school through university. Elizabeth earned a master’s degree in neuroscience at the University of Ottawa, but returned full-time to the family business in the middle of her PhD studies. She said the call of the store was greater than that of science. Allan also came back shortly after finishing his undergraduate degree. The problems they noticed with big-box retail are not surprising. Their Canadian Tire store covers 90,000 square feet, carries 55,000 SKUs and employs more than 250 people. Staff were expected to cover the equivalent of roughly two basketball courts of floor space with 14-foot high shelves blocking visibility, Allan said. “We had really talented staff,” he explained. “We knew we were paying to have people on the floor whose job was to say, how can I help you? But the floor is big and the tools we had weren’t built for this kind of scale.” The store had traditional call buttons, but they came with a critical limitation: there was no data attached to them. Management had no visibility into how often the buttons were pressed, how long it took a staff member to respond, or if the customer would still be there when help finally arrived. Plus, they were not used much. A manual count revealed the store was averaging only 17 button presses per 1,000 customer visits, according to the Malcomsons. So they tried an off-the-shelf solution. It involved the customer scanning a QR code for a text-for-help app sourced from a U.S. company. It performed even worse than the call buttons, with interactions dropping to just seven per 1,000 customers. “Customers still don’t like scanning QR codes,” Allan said. “That became a non-starter pretty quickly.” What came next was a scrappier experiment. The siblings bought 100 Tile tracker devices on clearance for a few dollars each, mounted them to makeshift signage throughout the store, and stationed an employee in an office for the weekend. Every time a customer pressed a button, the employee received an alert on the app and radioed the floor for help. Button presses jumped to 170 per 1,000 transactions in that first weekend alone. Elizabeth said the results confirmed that customers wanted to ask for help, but the existing tools weren’t giving them a good way to do it. Allan also explained how radio traffic was disruptive. Routing every request to every employee was inefficient. “We created an incredible amount of radio traffic,” he said, “which our staff hated because they had to be listening all the time. But we did also realize we were getting targeted outcomes.” The value of directing staff with specific skills to the right customer was immediately clear. “Now we were sending the people that liked selling $2,000 gazebos to the customer that wanted to buy a $2,000 gazebo,” Allan said. “Or, if someone is standing in front of the locked case for razor blades. Who cares if you want to sell razor blades or not? Do you have the key? Because the most important thing is we get that case open.” The next step saw the siblings partner with their cousin’s Ottawa-based technology firm, Anvil, to create a custom platform. They created their own whiteboard sketches and designed the routing algorithm and staff deployment profile themselves. Anvil wrote the code. The product launched internally under the name CX Beacon Project and ran exclusively inside the family’s Canadian Tire store for roughly a year. The system worked. Sales increased. Customer satisfaction improved. Employee satisfaction went up. The decision to commercialize what they had built came through an unexpected channel when an operator from another Canadian Tire franchise visited the Kanata store. That person noticed the buttons and asked who sold them. When Allan explained that he and Elizabeth had built the system themselves, the response surprised him: the operator wanted to buy it. “He asked who do I buy it from, and I said, well, I guess me,” Allan laughed. “And he's like, what do you mean, me? And I was like, oh, listen, I built this. And he's like, you guys built this on your own? I'm like, yeah, kind of. Yeah, maybe we could sell it to you.” The siblings installed their first commercial deployments at two Canadian Tire locations in September 2023. The company didn’t formally register as a legal entity until late 2024, when it became Meerby. They joined L-SPARK, Ottawa’s technology accelerator, where they met marketing team member Natasha Tardioli and became a certified partner on the Zebra Technologies platform, which is a widely used device ecosystem in retail environments. By the end of 2024, the Meerby system had been deployed in more than a dozen locations in different industries, including Tim Hortons. Today, Meerby is deployed across eight banners, including two U.S. retail brands, and some quick-service restaurants. Now, Allan says they’ve incorporated AI to optimize staff deployments. They’ve met SOC-2 compliance and learned new skill sets to work with AI. There is no longer a need for an employee to sit in an office and radio help. Instead, AI identifies the button’s location and any skills required to service that request, such as the ability to mix paint or open a locked display case. It scans which employees are currently logged in, where they are in the store, and what skills they have on file. Every employee carries a device to receive pings. The system routes the request to roughly three employees in the primary zone. If the staff members are already with customers, the request automatically escalates to a secondary, and so on through five levels. Managers can watch requests and responses in real time, including how long it takes an employee to claim a request, get to the customer and complete the interaction. Staff log the interaction at the end of each request. “What we’re really proud of and really the differentiator is that, in most of our deployments, customers are getting help in about a minute,” Elizabeth said. “It knows who’s available and will go out fast, and that’s a metric the management can see in real time.” The platform also handles higher-priority situations, including panic buttons for staff who feel unsafe, spill reports, Code Adam protocols for missing children and automated external defibrillator (AED) usage tracking. Those alerts route only to management, bypassing the general staff pool. Meerby has built nine levels of urgency into the system, using data collected across millions of interactions. The company even found that customers exhibit different patience thresholds depending on what they’re shopping for. Allan explained how a customer browsing smart home devices will wait less time before leaving than one trying to find the correct fuse for an electrical panel. One advantage the siblings cite is Meerby’s hardware component. The system requires a physical installation, which creates a stickiness with clients but also demands an on-site setup process. Meerby sends a two-person team to every deployment and often involves the founders directly in the process. “We’re not a third-party installer that pops up and walks away,” Allan said. “We’re invested. We speak the language of retail because we came from retail.” Running the company as siblings has been less complicated than outsiders might expect, the pair said. They describe a natural division of responsibilities developed over years of co-managing the Kanata Canadian Tire store, along with the trust that comes from a shared long-term goal. “You know you’re working with someone who you can trust and is going to go the distance,” Elizabeth said. “I’m never worried that he’s not going to be right there with me.”