S: Alfred Sung was the first designer at Club Monaco, the Canadian-born fashion chain that turns 25 this year. To celebrate, Club has produced limited-edition reissue of their ubiquitous 80s logo sweatshirt. Sung is now an internationally-acclaimed bridal gown designer with a bestselling eponymous perfume and affordable home and fashion lines at Zellers and Club was bought from founder and design dynamo Joe Mimran by Polo Ralph Lauren ten years ago. But that doesn't make us any less proud. It helps that the retro sweats are only available in Canada, in select stores.

T: The table top hockey game was invented by Donald Munro in the early 1930s. It was simple enough: a small rink that put miniature players on twisting metal spikes. The first prototype was made out of scrap metal and bits of wood, born of necessity because Munro couldn't afford to buy Christmas presents (this was the Great Depression, after all). Early handmade Munro mechanicals are highly collectible today.

U: Umbra: Umbra is Latin for "shade"; it is also the name of the internationally known Canadian design company. Umbra designs and manufactures hundreds of new products a year - frames, clocks, stools - and sells them at affordable prices through thousands of retailers worldwide. Garbino, a repurposed polypropylene waste basket that Karim Rashid designed for Umbra is in the permanent collection of MoMA. Umbra produced its first product in 1979. It was a blind printed with a blue wave pattern. It didn't sell well.

V: Venetian Cream Amoretta: Exactly one hundred years ago, Canadian-born Elizabeth Arden launched her international cosmetics empire with one humble product: Venetian Cream Amoretta. A genius at selling beauty and hope in a jar, Arden claimed the formula was created according to an ancient European recipe. (It wasn't; she and a chemist concocted it in New York). But despite its domestic provenance that face cream had the unusual, exotic consistency of whipped egg whites. It sold like mad, made her rich (she later opened Red Door salons worldwide and launched perfumes) and made her a household name. Except that as it turns out, Elizabeth Arden wasn't her real name! Born Florence Nightingale Graham on December 31, 1884, she was raised on 200 acres of farmland land in Woodbridge, Ont., and studied to be a nurse before moving to New York and becoming one of the world's most successful businesswomen.

W: Scottie Wilson: "The pen seemed to make me draw, and them images, the faces and designs just flowed out." These are the words of Scottie Wilson. Wilson immigrated to Canada from Scotland after the Great War, in which he'd served as a soldier. He opened a second-hand shop on College St. in Toronto, and led an unremarkable life until 1935, when he started drawing on a cardboard tabletop. His drawings featured flowers, birds, and sinister visages known as Greedies or Evils. They attracted the attention of an art dealer, who gave Wilson a gallery show in town. At the time of his death in 1979, Wilson had come to be considered a significant Outsider artist and his work was collected by the likes of Dubuffet and Picasso.

X: X-rated stars. We produce quite a few of them up here. Does the name Lanny Barbie or Peter "The Bucket" North ring any bells? We don't want to brag but there should be a limerick about what happens once you go Canuck.

Y: Ying Gao: Ying Gao is Canada's most daring fashion designer. A professor who runs a fashion lab at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Ying Gao combines cutting-edge microtechnology and textiles to create something she calls "modulatable" clothing. A recent collection was constructed from honeycombed pockets cut from a lightweight fabric engineered in Japan -- a fabric so fine, it feels the way Purell does as it evaporates from the skin.

Z: Z is for how we say the letter z, which is zed, not zee. Although we do love Canadian stylist and ELLE editor Joe Zee. (And Zambonis.)