KENOSEE LAKE —She is a successful “businesswoman,” she’s been called an entrepreneur and she’s only 11 years old.
Her name is Heidi Lamontagne and she lives with her family at Kenosee Lake in Moose Mountain Provincial Park. She is a Grade 6 student at Wawota Parkland School.
During her short life, Heidi has gone on many vacations with her family. Like most young children, she has a fascination with stickers. During her travels, she has collected hundreds of stickers, which she now proudly displays on the wall of her garage – a sticker art gallery of sorts. She also loves sticking them on her water bottles.
In 2023, while on one of her travels, a thought entered her mind – “Why can’t I make some stickers for the area I live in?” Upon arriving home, she looked over her garage wall collection and saw a sticker that she really liked from Yosemite National Park in California. It was a montage of wildlife native to the park. She started tinkering with it and came up with a rough design for a sticker for the park she lived in. She sent it to a graphic designer, who “professionalized” it.
The result was her first sticker. Since that time, she has created 17 more.
Most of her stickers focus on aspects of Kenosee Lake, such as the beach and Golf Kenosee. But she has made others, such as a maple leaf, a paw print, an ice cream cone and even one of Saskatchewan.
Most of Heidi’s designs come from her own ideas, but she also draws inspiration from her garage wall and the internet. She desires to create stickers that bring back memories for those who have bought them. She has set a personal goal to introduce five new stickers every year.
She takes the idea and then begins to draw it out, giving thought to such things as colour schemes, size and shape. With help from a designer and a manufacturer, Heidi then takes the finished product to various outlets, where they can be purchased. You’ll find them in locations such as the pro shop at Golf Kenosee, the Beachin Lake Shop, the Kenosee MiniMart and the Home Hardware store in Carlyle.
Her business is so successful that she has even given it a name – Lake Life Stickers, complete with a logo.
The collection of stickers that Heidi Lamontagne has created. | Photo courtesy Jennifer Greenbank.
Her business may not yet have made her as rich as Taylor Swift, but for a young girl who is not even in her teens, she has done well for herself. Creating stickers, however, has provided much more than monetary benefits. She has learned how to handle money (giving change, etc.) and how to invoice. She has also learned salesmanship as she has tried to add more retail outlets to those she already has.
And she has found great enjoyment in it.
What is her favourite part about owning her own business? She loves designing the stickers and she really enjoys putting more money into her bank account.
As busy as this business keeps her, she also has other interests in life. She is active in gymnastics and would like to see how far that will take her. But in the meantime, she wants to keep her sticker business going at least through her teen years and then she’ll take it day by day after that.
