Meet the Shopkeeper: Liam of The Kilted Moose T-Shirt Company

Liam has made a new coastal life in Cape Breton and is thriving. Photography by Elizabeth Kaiser Confiant

Long before Liam Ashleigh began selling T-shirts on the Sydney waterfront, he was scaling fish in his family’s market in England.

Fishmongering was the family business. It taught Liam how to work with his hands, understand a product and serve the person standing on the other side of the counter. At the time, he had no way of knowing that those lessons would eventually follow him across the Atlantic and into a very different kind of coastal family business.

Liam’s connection to Nova Scotia began when he was still a teenager living in England. He met a group of Nova Scotians and quickly became friends with them. Between 2006 and 2009, Liam visited Nova Scotia five times.

“I kept coming back,” he says. “There was something about the people and the place that felt right to me. By 2009, I knew I wanted to find a way to live here.”

That year, Liam moved to Canada on a one-year work permit. He settled in Halifax and found his first job at Value Village. It was there that he met his future wife, Christina, a Cape Bretoner.

Over the next several years, Liam’s life stretched across the Atlantic. He moved between Halifax and the United Kingdom. Together, Liam and Christina travelled the world and built a life that reached far beyond either of their original homes.

In 2016, they welcomed their daughter and becoming parents changed their priorities. By 2017, Liam and Christina knew it was time to move closer to family and their support system. That decision brought them home to Cape Breton.

Almost immediately after arriving in Cape Breton, Liam began working at The Kilted Moose T-Shirt Company under owner Bruce Meloney. Located at the Joan Harriss Cruise Pavilion, the shop offers T-shirts, hoodies, hats, magnets, postcards, mugs and other souvenirs that allow visitors to carry a little piece of Cape Breton home with them.

“I was new to Cape Breton, but I understood what it meant to take pride in where you come from,” Liam says. “The shop gave me a chance to learn more about the island and to meet people from all over the world who were excited to experience it.”

From the beginning, Bruce and Liam worked well together. Bruce understood the history of the business and how to operate a seasonal shop on a busy waterfront. Liam brought his own retail experience, international perspective and ideas for the future.

“Bruce and I learned a lot from each other,” Liam says. “He taught me how the shop worked and what customers had come to expect. At the same time, he was always open to hearing my ideas and letting me take on more responsibility.” It soon became clear that Liam was more than an employee. He was becoming part of the future of The Kilted Moose.

“A T-shirt or a magnet might seem like a small thing, but it can hold a memory,” Liam says. “Someone sees it at home and remembers the people they met here, the music they heard or the view from the waterfront.”

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In 2025, Bruce and Liam began talking seriously about the long-term future of the business. Together, they decided that Liam would gradually take over The Kilted Moose, with the transition planned to be completed by 2028.

For Bruce, it means passing the shop to someone who understands what he has built. For Liam, it is an opportunity to carry the business forward while respecting the relationships, lessons and identity that made it successful.

“You don’t take over something like this by coming in and changing everything,” Liam says. “You listen, you learn and you respect the work that came before you. Then you look for ways to keep it growing.”

The work he does today may look very different from his family’s fish market, but the values are familiar. Know what you are selling. Take pride in it. Listen to your customers and never forget the people who helped build the business before you arrived.

“The Kilted Moose has become part of our family’s story,” Liam says. “Bruce trusted me with something he spent years building and I want to honour that. I want people to feel the same warmth and welcome here that first made me fall in love with Nova Scotia.”

From butchering fish in England to building a future on the Cape Breton waterfront, Liam’s tools may have changed, but the heart of the work remains the same: family, community and a good conversation across the counter.