Gisele Derhak has been what we like to call our ‘Den Mother’ for the last 30 years, dating back to the days when Dom Jr. was just a pup himself. She came in and did a complete overhaul of our accounting practices to bring our books up to snuff, tackling HR, health and safety, and basically anything the boss threw at her (and he sure did throw a lot). “There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure. That’s what keeps us coming back,” she laughed.
When Gisele was asked if a particular memory stood out over her long tenure at Dom’s, she thought about it overnight and came back the next morning recounting our 2003 fire: “All of us were standing outside watching everything disappear before our eyes, not knowing if we even had jobs to come back to. We were all sent home that day and the very next morning before 6 AM, I got a call from Dominic saying, ‘Get ready, we’re going shopping.’ We went out and bought office supplies, our neighbour gave us access to his offices, and we were up and running within days. Other local businesses brought us spare desks, chairs and computers, coffee and donuts were flowing in, and we were taking orders by hand on note paper. It was overwhelming, like nothing I’ve ever seen… That’s Dom’s. That was a ‘sixty’ moment,” she said with tears in her eyes.
“I’ve had ten other jobs and none of them were like this, like a family,” she mused, “I could write a book about this place.” Gisele continues to work at Dom’s today alongside her family at her home-away-from-home, as she calls it. Employees like Gisele are the glue that’s helped hold us together all this time, and we love her so much for that.
