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/1406705
"It was like building a seawall for a 1,000- year storm," Brayshaw says of his business tac- tics before COVID ever arrived on these shores. "I'm a pathological fiddler." When the storm did come, Pulpfiction, now with three stores, more than rode it out. Stuck at home much of the time, people were reading more than usual. Brayshaw increased his team of delivery drivers to three and established weekly delivery runs into the Fraser Valley and North Shore and monthly to Squamish. "Topline sales grew significantly," he says, estimating that 20 to 25 percent of orders are now made online. In many cases, small businesses that made pandemic pivots have decided they're not going back to the old ways. Pre- COVID, Van- couver clothing designer Lexi Soukoreff sold most of her activewear at consumer craft shows across Canada. With the pandemic, the events were all cancelled. "It basically came to a complete standstill," says the owner of Daub + Design. "We would cater our entire year to those shows. [Now] I'm sitting on thousands of dollars of inventory." So how was Daub + Design going to move its product? It did already have a website, though it was until then used for marketing purposes only. Soukoreff upgraded it to take online orders and "dove straight into email market- ing," social media and Facebook ads, she says. She launched a line of infection-suppressing masks just to maintain some cash flow and was gratified to move $22,000 worth of product in their first day. Toward the end of the year, Soukoreff took percent of Innovative Fitness's existing clients signed on. They didn't want to become couch potatoes. Also, their feedback over the ensu- ing weeks and months indicated that they considered the electronic delivery more convenient than in-person training sessions, and the experience almost as good. When B.C. allowed gyms to reopen—with capacity limits and anti-infection protocols—in June 2020, 56 percent of IF's clients said they wanted to continue training at home some or all of the time. Indeed, through word of mouth, the company started picking up cli- ents in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York. Inno- vative started signing on new trainers located nowhere near its gyms. The digital platform suddenly freed the organization from any geographical confines. It dawned on Christopherson that "this was a way bigger opportunity than we thought it was going to be." He began to see it as a whole different organiza- tion, a kind of Uber or Airbnb for personal trainers, wherever they may be. It would eventually trans- form, with an infusion of $3 million in seed capital, into Wrkout. Now in a "public beta" stage, the digital platform hosted 200 trainers and 300 cli- ents as of early July. "We on-boarded 20 clients in the last four days," Chris- topherson says. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Many independent B.C. companies found their business models to be non- starters once people were forbidden from crossing borders or coming into contact indoors. But in their desperate attempt to survive, a few of these small and midsize enter- prises, like Innovative/ Wrkout, hit upon novel and even lucrative new ways of doing business over the past 18 months. New products, new mar- kets, new delivery technology and processes changed them in ways that will make them stronger, if not ultimately bigger, too. C R I S I S = O P P O R T U N I T Y In some cases, the seeds of these new business models were sown years in advance. When Chris Brayshaw opened his first Pulpfiction Books store on Vancouver's Main Street in 2000, virtually all his business came from about a 10-block radius, he says. But being in competition with Amazon, he found himself adding services like online payment and home delivery just to go the extra mile for customers. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 75 E-READING Pulpfiction Books owner Chris Bray- shaw (right) and clothing maker Daub + Design pivoted to online sales TOP: DAN TOULGOET/VANCOUVER IS AWESOME