Canada’s original Children’s Trunk Show is a biannual shopping event featuring 60+ mom-run boutique companies selling one-of-a-kind products for babies and kids. This year, it takes place in the Distillery District on November 6 and 7.

Its founders, Julie Ritchie and Kim Nichols, offer some insight on why they chose SickKids Foundation as their charitable beneficiary:

Our Children’s Trunk Show event offers a dynamic, stroller-friendly opportunity for parents and their children to mix, mingle and shop. We wanted to support moms who run their own companies and offer them a vehicle to help distribute their products.

We grew up together, went to high school together and basically stumbled into a career together. Kim had children first and tried to juggle raising her kids with her career as a representative for a personalized bedding company. Julie, now a mom, travelled the world importing clothes for toddlers. Neither of us had a venue to sell our goods!

There were exclusive, invitation-only trunk show events popping up all over New York so we decided to follow suit and plan one for Canada. With two suppliers on hand and invitations to a select group of friends, our company was born.

Given the show’s focus of children and families, the choice to introduce SickKids Foundation as a charitable partner was a natural one. We’ve been donating a portion of the admission fees to SickKids since we started back in 2004.

We feel that it’s extremely important to give back to the community and we feel strongly that The Hospital for Sick Children is a worthy cause. We’ve both counted on SickKids for our own families’ needs – so have a lot of our vendors.

SickKids is an asset to the city and an institution we’re sincerely proud to support.

We hope to see you at our trunk show this weekend!

~ Julie Ritchie and Kim Nichols

For more information on the Children’s Trunk Show, please visit www.childrenstrunkshow.com