With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1222419
BCBUSINESS.CA APRIL 2020 BCBUSINESS 27 F I N A L I S T S LULU WANG + ASHLEY WU F O U N D E R S , S P A R K S S T E A M A C A D E M Y AT FIRST GLANCE, Sparks STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) Academy looks like a typical education camp for kids aged three to 15. But the brainchild of Lulu Wang and Ashley Wu is more progressive than your average program. This is, after all, an institution that quotes both Albert Einstein and Elon Musk in the Phi- losophy section of its website. "The traditional classroom is teacher-centred—the mate- rial is being taught to the kids," says Wang, who argues that Sparks is focused on the pupil. "It's more personalized learn- ing, where students can actually discover learning behav- iours and perspectives." So far, attendance at the year-round camp has nearly tripled from 30 kids when it launched in July 2018. There are also plans to open a second location to complement Sparks' current spot in Vancouver's Kerrisdale neighbourhood. The returning-student ratio is about 90 percent, Wang says. "All of that is growing organically from referrals." —N.C. F I N A L I S T LYNDSAY SCOTT F O U N D E R + C E O , K I N D R E D C U L T U R E S LYNDSAY SCOTT was a project coordinator until she started selling infused-water kefir beverages out of Metro Vancouver farmers markets in 2018. The con- coction helped her son overcome autoimmune dysfunction, whereby one's immune system attacks the body, and the Richmond native real- ized how big the market opportunity was. Kindred Cultures now sells in 36 stores in three provinces and Yukon; in February, it launched in what Scott calls the "Holy Grail of natural foods retailers," Whole Foods Market. "It's an incredibly valuable opportunity for brand awareness and validity," she says, adding that she hopes to go national this year. Scott, who has "a couple other product ideas that we've always been toying around with," also pledges to start expanding further into cultured plant-based products. —N.C. F I N A L I S T KYLA DUFRESNE F O U N D E R + C E O , F O X Y B O X W A X B A R F I N A L I S T SHAINA AZAD F O U N D E R + C E O , S U V A B E A U T Y WHERE TO START with Shaina Azad? Maybe in Cairo, where she worked as a cor- respondent for Egypt News Daily before that country's 2011 revolution. Or perhaps it's a couple of years later, on the production sets of Budweiser and Coca-Cola Super Bowl commercials, for which she did makeup. • But then we'd be forgetting the downtown Vancouver food court where Azad began selling her makeup kits in 2014, to students she'd just taught at the nearby Blanche Macdonald Centre. That was the start of Suva Beauty. "I had a lot of international students, especially from China and Taiwan," Azad remembers. "They started bulk-buying Suva Beauty, and I basically sold out within the first two months and started developing more products, more customized stuff, things like that." • Since then, the Vancouver company has been featured in stores like Bloomingdales and Forever 21 and, in 2019, Los Angeles–based makeup giant Morphe Cosmetics picked up its line. Azad believes it won't be long before Suva does a major expansion into Europe and her old stomping grounds in the Middle East. —N.C. "I WAS entrepre- neurial as soon as I came out of the womb," says Kyla Dufresne. "I've always been a bit of a hustler." Dropping out of high school in Grade 10, Dufresne became a server and bartender and "just made money." At 20, she started a clothing line, abandoning the idea after about two years. But following her first Brazilian wax, she found setting up appointments was more painful than the actual process. "There was a missing gap in the market— you either had to pre-book weeks in advance or go to the back of a seedy nail salon." So in 2012, she began planning a business around a fast, convenient and fun place to get waxed and started taking clients in the dining room of a house she shared with two room- mates. The waxes cost $20 a pop and came with a shot of tequila or whisky. Soon she was doing 15 clients a week. Dufresne moved to down- town Victoria and kept expanding. Now she's got two 2,400-square-foot corporate locations in her hometown— combined revenue hit $2.5 million last year—plus two franchises, in Courtenay and Nanaimo, and about 50 employ- ees. Her "big, hairy audacious goal" is 50 locations in four years. –N.C.