Do not sell or share my personal information
As described in our Privacy Policy, we collect personal information from your interactions with us and our website, including through cookies and similar technologies. We may also share this personal information with third parties, including advertising partners. We do this in order to show you ads on other websites that are more relevant to your interests and for other reasons outlined in our privacy policy.
Sharing of personal information for targeted advertising based on your interaction on different websites may be considered "sales", "sharing," or "targeted advertising" under certain U.S. state privacy laws. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to opt out of these activities. If you would like to exercise this opt-out right, please follow the instructions below.
If you visit our website with the Global Privacy Control opt-out preference signal enabled, depending on where you are, we will treat this as a request to opt-out of activity that may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information or other uses that may be considered targeted advertising for the device and browser you used to visit our website.
Our Shop
When we put a "Made in Canada" label on our boxes, we really mean it. Every part of our homes are made in our Ottawa shop from raw materials, and we finish each of them by hand in small batches.
Each of our designs start as a one-of-a-kind piece, without consideration for how to manufacture them at scale. From there, we create custom jigs and processes that let us produce multiples, while still keeping true to the original concept. We try to keep all of our work to very tight tolerances, which allows us to create a highly polished final product without having to craft each home one at a time.
Our goal is to offer products that are as good or better than something you could have custom made, at a fraction of the price.
Company History
Scopa was founded in 2022 to help reverse the significant decline in our planet's biodiversity. Each year we lose 1% of the world's species, with the majority of those being insects that are the foundation of life on Earth.
While we are starting modestly by focusing on bee homes, our hope is to use this as the starting point to launch a series of products and ventures that change the way people think about the ecosystem around them and the role insects play in it. We believe that once people see with their own eyes the incredible biodiversity - or lack thereof - that is in their own yard, doing things like keeping a perfectly green lawn will seem antiquated. There is genuine beauty in biodiversity, and we want to create things that help people to see that beauty.
We want our products to stand on their own as compelling objects worthy of the natural materials they are made of. They should give people something they cherish and maintain, and that they can proudly put in their yards to become a focus of attention and conversation.
Our name is borrowed from our wild bee friends, and refers to the hairs that many have on their hind legs or abdomen. They use these hairs to hold the pollen they gather, and it originates from the Latin word for "broom."
The Founders
Scopa was founded in 2022 by Ryan Brideau and Dr. Jessica Forrest in Ottawa, Canada.
Dr. Forrest is the head of the Forrest Lab at the University of Ottawa, which studies the evolutionary ecology of plant–pollinator interactions. Her research explores how pollinators and animal-pollinated plants are coping in a world that is getting hotter and more densely populated by humans. Her lab is also interested in basic aspects of bee biology and pollination ecology, with her current students' projects focusing on wild bees in agricultural landscapes and forests, effects of drought and urban heat on solitary bees, and the evolution of pollen preferences among wild bees.
Ryan is a former Senior Data Scientist at Shopify and Wealthsimple. Prior to this he was a product manager at Serenova, and is a graduate of NEXT Canada. He holds degrees in physics and economics, and is an avid lover of woodworking and the outdoors. He joined Shopify because of his passion for supporting small businesses, and spent 4 years on their retail and point-of-sale team where he helped guide the team and its retail merchants through the pandemic in early 2020. He is the primary designer, leads the production team, and runs the day-to-day operations.