When Kirby Wirchenko looks back at the road that led to being named a director at Saskatoon’s TCU Place earlier this year, he says it started more than three decades ago at Brainsport.
Wirchenko and Brainsport owner Brian Michasiw had been friends since their early teens and when Michasiw shared his dream of opening a running store, Wirchenko pushed him to do it. The pair graduated high school in 1988 and, a couple years later, Michasiw and his partner Debbie Harksen secured a lease at a storefront on Broadway Avenue. Wirchenko, then 20, showed up to help clean and retrofit the space.
On opening day in July 1991, Wirchenko swung by to see how his friends were doing. Michasiw and Harksen were run off their feet so Wirchenko — who had helped organize the store’s inventory — stepped up to help with sales. That evening Michasiw and Harksen asked him to come on as Brainsport’s first employee.
“I always loved shoes and so selling them was just a natural thing,” Wirchenko says. And the job was so much more than that: “They allowed me to make mistakes, to learn lessons … you make progress when you treat something like it’s yours and so they always treated me like an owner.”
Michasiw said empowering Wirchenko to think of Brainsport as his own was a no-brainer.
“Keep in mind I was 21 years old with zero education and experience in running a business. Brainsport needed all the help we could get,” Michasiw says. “But, more importantly, when a person like Kirby comes into your life as a friend or an employee (and in my case both) you quickly realize how lucky you are to be around someone that is 100% devoted to you and your business.”
Wirchenko worked full-time at the store for nearly three years and was Brainsport’s only full-time floor employee for much of that time. He left for a stint to travel, then returned to Saskatoon in his mid-20s to pursue a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Saskatchewan. He worked at Brainsport part time while studying and eventually convinced Michasiw and Harksen to appoint him as the store’s first manager.
In the early 2000s Wirchenko was eager to put Brainsport on the map nationally and arranged for himself and Michasiw – then the store’s sole owner – to travel to Ontario and Quebec for meet-and-greets with the Canadian heads of top shoe companies. But the day before the pair were scheduled to leave, Brainsport’s basement flooded. “There were shoe boxes floating, it was that much water,” Wirchenko recalled.
Wirchenko told Michasiw to take the trip without him, but Michasiw said he trusted Wirchenko to represent the store; he would stay behind to clean up.
“That trust meant so much,” Wirchenko says. “I feel like we both grew up a lot that weekend.”
Wirchenko left Brainsport in 2006 to work as the Canadian director for Vancouver-based SUGOI and then took the helm of Saskatoon’s Broadway Theatre in 2008. At the time the Broadway had an annual budget of about $250,000 and saw roughly 25,000 visits a year. Before COVID-19 disrupted the arts industry, the theatre had a budget of nearly $2 million and was welcoming 85,000 people each year.
“We built a national reputation for that little tiny building. And it wasn’t because we mowed it down and built a new sexy building, it was because we just made use of what we had – and I’d say I learned an awful lot about how to do that from my time at Brainsport,” Wirchenko says.
After nearly 14 years at the Broadway – and once he felt confident the theatre would survive post-pandemic – Wirchenko began a new adventure earlier this year as director of community engagement at TCU Place. He’s part of a team looking at ways to expand the types of shows offered at the venue and is exploring ways to make the centre more accessible. It may take the centre a year or more to be operating at the capacity it was before the pandemic, but Wirchenko and his team feel things ramping up and are keen to grow even farther.
To get there, Wirchenko will lean on the skills he started developing when he sold that first pair of shoes all those years ago.
“At Brainsport we treated people as best we could, everyone got treated with respect,” he says. “I know business is not about dollars. Business is all about people. It’s all about relationships … and I learned that at Brainsport.”
