 Most people only do this once. They've never packed up a parent's house before, never had to decide what goes and what stays after fifty years of accumulated living. They don't know what they're walking into, and by the time they figure it out, they're already exhausted. That's where Monica de Wit comes in. Monica is the founder of HUGO and Company, a senior transition and move management company serving families across Southwestern Ontario and beyond. The work is practical on the surface, floor plans, packing, coordinating, hanging pictures, and placing familiar things in unfamiliar spaces. But what families are actually handing over when they call HUGO is the weight of one of the hardest things they'll ever have to do. And what Monica and her team hand back, at the end of a long day, is something that looks and feels like home.  It started, maybe unexpectedly, with Christmas porch planters. Monica has a background in fashion design and interior design, and spent years teaching at Fanshawe while building the business on the side. She wasn't following a plan so much as following what kept presenting itself. A connection to a retirement facility in London led to more interior work. That interior work kept leading her to seniors. Seniors who were downsizing, families who didn't know where to start, people on either side of a move who needed someone to just come in and handle it. By 2016, a grant through her local Small Business Enterprise Centre (did you know we are one of 54 across Ontario?) prompted her to write a proper business plan, and that's when the pattern she'd already been living became something she could actually see. She decided to do it on purpose. The name HUGO comes from her family. It appears throughout her lineage in a kind of rotating pattern, generation after generation. It's a nod to her Dutch immigrant roots, to a family that didn't worry much about whether the kitchen chairs matched, that valued sitting down together more than the setting. Monica still talks about the work that way. Not as a service, exactly, but as using what she's good at to serve the people around her. That framing matters because it shows up in how the work actually gets done.
What's made HUGO and Company genuinely distinctive over the years is the dementia specialization. Monica consults on the design of care home spaces, drawing on what she knows about furniture selection, colour contrast, and environmental cues to better support people living with dementia. That same knowledge travels into every transition the team manages. When they move someone into a memory care home, they're not just arranging furniture. They're thinking about what objects carry meaning, what sightlines feel safe, what small details might help someone feel oriented rather than lost. The whole team is currently getting certified through Alzheimer's, which feels less like a credential they're chasing and more like a formalization of something they've been learning for years. For families navigating a dementia diagnosis, that kind of expertise is hard to overstate. They're often making decisions on behalf of someone who can't fully participate in the process, trying to honour a person's life and preferences while also accepting a new reality. HUGO handles the logistics, yes, but they also handle the emotional choreography of it. They coordinate with care homes, they work from floor plans, they learn what matters to the person who's moving, and they make sure those things are visible and present when that person walks in the door.
Monica has a story she comes back to. A retired businessman moving into a memory care home. His desk had always been important to him, so the team worked it into a 300 square foot room, arranged his books, set out a few significant things. The care home had meetings scheduled for him the next morning. He walked in and, in his mind, went to work. His family didn't have to carry that transition alone, and the home had a resident who settled in without the distress that so often accompanies those first few days. That's the work. That's what it means. She's expanded beyond London now. HUGO has teams in Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto, with roots in communities stretching from Woodstock and Ingersoll to Guelph and Brantford. Growth has been entirely organic, a care home refers a client, a client tells a friend, and momentum builds. Monica hired a business coach in 2024, put systems and processes in place, and has been working steadily toward a model that doesn't depend entirely on her being in the room. That's harder than it sounds when the work is this personal. But she's building toward something that can go on past her own capacity, and she knows that's the right direction.  Running a business that sits this close to people's hardest moments takes a particular kind of team. Monica is thoughtful about that. The informal measure she keeps returning to is whether there's a hug at the end of the day, from the client, from a family member, sometimes from both. It sounds simple. It's also, when you think about what it takes to earn it, a pretty meaningful benchmark. Monica and her husband recently made a move of their own, downsizing from London to Port Stanley. She'll tell you she was her own best client. They found a house with a glimpse of the lake through the trees, got a dog, fell in love with the community, and haven't looked back. She's now getting connected in the St. Thomas area, joining the Chamber of Commerce, attending local networking events, and building a presence here alongside the work that's already reaching into this part of the province. If any of this sounds like something your family might need, or might need sooner than you think, it's worth a conversation. You can find HUGO and Company at hugoandcompany.com, by calling 844-511-HUGO, or via the social links below.
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