TORONTO – Hudson’s Bay is sending its coat collection to the auction block.
The latest sale of the company’s treasures features 56 coats, including many with HBC’s iconic stripes motif.
Some of the coats are a nod to the 355-year-old company’s fur trading history and are made of beaver, silver fox or mink fur. Others were made in partnership with Canadian designers Smythe and HiSO or come in non-traditional HBC colours like scarlet or royal blue.
HBC, Canada’s oldest company which closed all of its stores last June, is selling the coats and its art and artifacts to generate some of the money it owes creditors.
The coats are part of the fifth group of HBC items Heffel Fine Art Auction House has sold since the department store collapsed last year.
At the time, HBC had 1,700 pieces of art and more than 2,700 artifacts. Twenty-seven of the paintings were sold in a live auction in November that generated $4.9 million. Subsequent auctions have been held online since then.
Heffel said Monday the latest auction of HBC goods has about 330 items, representing just a sliver of the broader collection.
In addition to the coats, this auction will sell vintage cash registers, radios, furniture and storage signage, an HBC piano, tobacco tins, wooden shipping crates and a reproduction of the 1670 royal charter that formed the company. (The original was purchased for $18 million last year by the Thomson and Weston families for donation to the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History and the Royal Ontario Museum.)
There is also ephemera from long-gone department stores HBC gobbled up like a door from the location Simpsons had on Queen Street in Toronto, a Kmart portable typewriter and a Morgan’s set with a teacup and saucer, a tie, a money bag and a beaded clutch.
Joining those items on the auction block is a first edition of “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier. The 1938 gothic novel tells the story of a woman who married a wealthy widower only to discover that he is being haunted by his first wife, Rebecca.
Rounding out the items in this auction are dozens of pieces of art from the likes of Kuba Bryzgalski, Jackson Beardy, William Featherston and Clarence Ingwall Tillenius. The art mostly depicts historical scenes from HBC history as well as former HBC stores, including its downtown Vancouver and Winnipeg locations and some owned by Woodward’s, a rival HBC purchased department stores from in 1993.
Heffel will start accepting bids for the items on its website Tuesday. The sale will run until March 19.
Further online auctions have yet to be scheduled but there are expected to be at least two more.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 9, 2026.
