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/1388249
BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 61 A D A M L A N D O AGE: 28 Founder + CEO Dad's Printing LIFE STORY: His latest business started with a failure of sorts, but Adam Lando is used to adversity. Lando, who was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, found high school and a brief stint at college difficult. "I did the best when I was passionate about what I was doing," says the Vancouverite, whose family has deep roots in his hometown. "Seeing what I was doing grow was something that made me buy into it." In his late teens, Lando used $150 to start selling snapback hats via Facebook, later distributing them from a suitcase at a coffee shop. He then launched clothing company WTFWear, covering its garments with outlandish prints. Pitching stores went nowhere. "They didn't like the designs at all–no one bought anything," Lando recalls. But when retailers began asking for clothes bearing their logos, he pivoted by founding Dad's Printing, named for what he and his friends used to call each other as a joke, in 2016. Besides producing custom apparel and promotional products for companies, Lando created several business-to-consumer brands, one of which now does a brisk trade printing pet photos on socks. Left reeling from the pandemic, Dad's moved into custom face masks, taking advantage of a weak Canadian dollar to expand stateside. So far, the company has sold 500,000 masks to clients includ- ing Telus Corp., Amazon.com and the Toronto District School Board. BOTTOM LINE : From two employees and $450,000 in revenue for 2019, Dad's Printing grew to 15 staff last year, when revenue hit $1.8 million. "We want to build the consumer side a lot more because I think it provides some more excite- ment and better margins," says Lando, whose five-year revenue goal is $25 million. Although he wants to keep Dad's in its 3,000-square-foot Vancouver space, it might move to the suburbs. Lando sees a bright future for North American manufacturers that forgo large-scale production: "It's being able to be nimble and systematically invest enough to do small runs." –N.R. S A M S I E G E L AGE: 29 Co-founder Sam's Original Art LIFE STORY: Sam Siegel was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as a kid growing up on Van- couver's west side and, as he puts it, "never had much of a shot at school." He ended up working at the Jericho Tennis Club's bar after high school for about nine years and became addicted to fentanyl. "I had surgery and was pre- scribed oxycodone, which I really liked," Siegel remembers. "So I tried to buy it on the street and started hanging out with the wrong people when eventually I couldn't get it anymore. They said, Try fentanyl. I was like, The stuff every- body is dying from? Who in their right mind would want to do that? And my friend said it was the same thing as oxy, just even better." Siegel was later admitted to a recovery facility in Nanaimo. "Went there a few times, every time after I would relapse, but I kept working the program, going to meetings," he says. He's been completely sober for about three years. In that time, Siegel, always a talented artist, partnered with his dad, who had recently sold his enter- tainment company, and his uncle to launch an art gallery in Kitsilano to sell Siegel's landscape paintings of Vancouver and its surrounding areas. Things started slow, but Siegel began figuring out SEO and kept tinkering with ways to bring people to the site and the gallery. "I was spending on advertising, boosting Instagram posts, running campaigns, making sure I always had something new to share and getting back to absolutely everybody, even fellow artists wondering what brush to use," he says. BOTTOM LINE : Siegel started seeing serious growth in the middle of 2020 and had his biggest month yet in December, hitting just shy of six figures in sales. His paintings have also found homes beyond where they're based, with customers in places like Hong Kong, France and Kentucky. –N.C. Sam Siegel 3 0 U N D E R T H I R T Y Adam Lando Sam Siegel