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/1501233
48 BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2023 3 3 UNDER M E L O D Y L I M AGE: 27 Founder and CEO, Mala the Brand LIFE STORY: Sometimes, to really succeed as an entrepreneur, you need a bit of a push. For Melody Lim, that came in 2019, when a passion project—producing candles from her parents' kitchen—raised the ire of her then-boss at a skincare startup, where she was working in marketing and sales. "He didn't agree with me doing my own side hustle, so he let me go." With "nothing else to lose," Lim decided to lean into her passion and use her savings (plus $10,000 won in a 2020 SFU pitch competition) to expand the business. When COVID hit, demand for all things home-related took off— and Lim was able to hire her mother (recently laid off from her receptionist job) to help pour candles. Around the same time, two big retailers—Indigo and Nordstrom—reached out to Lim, requesting to stock her eco-friendly candles (Mala candles use non- toxic, clean ingredients and minimal, earth-friendly packaging). Mala had been producing about 1,000 candles a month, sold online as well as through select retailers. All of a sudden, with the Indigo and Nordstrom deals (the latter of which includes 35 U.S. loca- tions), she was up to 3,000 or 4,000 candles a month, out of her parents' kitchen and into a Richmond produc- tion facility, along with eight part- and full-time employees. Her mom is still involved, though no longer Mala's full- time candlemaker: "She helps with everything: warehouse operations, packaging—anything that needs to be done." BOTTOM LINE : What started as a web-only business now counts 65 percent of its sales through retail; one of Lim's first non-family hires was a retail consultant who has helped get Mala into over 350 stores or chains, including Whole Foods, Holt Renfrew and Bloomingdales. In 2021, Mala saw revenues of $2.7 million; this year, Lim expects revenues to top out at $6 or $7 million. With numbers like that, it's no surprise that Lim has been approached about selling the business, but she says she's not ready to exit quite yet: "In fact, in the next three years, I want to open my own candle store in Vancouver." –M.O. K A T I E G A M B L E AGE: 28 Founder and CEO, Nature Bee LIFE STORY: It's not often that someone wins BCBusiness accolades two years in a row, but just over a year after taking home a Women of the Year award in the Rising Star category, Katie Gamble is back in our pages. It shouldn't be terribly surprising—after all, Gamble's Saanichton-based Nature Bee, with its sustainable home goods, just keeps on growing. Gamble, a UVic commerce grad, started the company to combat against single-use plastics and cre- ated Nature Bee's flagship product, eco-friendly beeswax wraps, in 2018. Since then, the company has also launched Swedish dish clothes and concentrated cleaning tablets. "People are my bread and butter, that's what I love: hiring, managing people, getting to hire people different than me and build it together," says Gamble. "Although it's a challenge, it's an exciting one. It's about managing sustainable growth in terms of what's the right step to take on, how many contracts, those kinds of things. Growing sustainably and consistently has been a challenge." Asked over the phone how she thinks her fellow employees would describe her as a leader, Gamble thinks for a couple of seconds before going straight to the source and putting a staff member named Abby on the spot. "I would describe her as encouraging and super supportive," Abby says without a moment's hesitation. "The glue that keeps us all engaged." You can't quite hear Gamble blush through the phone, but you can feel it: "And I would describe myself as chaotic. That was very kind of Abby." BOTTOM LINE : Nature Bee has close to a dozen employees and is in some 350 stores in North America (and one in Switzerland), including Whole Foods. –N.C.