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
3 3 UNDER V I V I A N L I U AGE: 29 Founder and CEO, Mae (Making Auto Easy) LIFE STORY: From an early age, Vivian Liu had a passion for the testosterone-fuelled world of cars: "In high school, I had a lot of friends who were working in the auto shop, and we would work on cars together and go to the auto show." In her fourth year at Western University, studying business, Liu entered a marketing competition called Canada's Next Top Ad Exec, sponsored by Chevrolet; coming out of it, Liu had a job offer in Kelowna, as district sales manager for General Motors. She was 21. "I was given a set of car keys, basically no instructions, and told, 'Okay, you're visiting these 18 dealerships, and you're going to learn their business and build relationships with them.'" Liu thrived in the unlikely environment, coaching middle-aged men on how to sell cars, but ultimately found some- thing lacking: the process for selling to female customers. She says that, while she was with GM, she often had women coming to her with ques- tions about various models or how to negotiate: "I realized that a lot of what I was doing for dealerships was infor- mation I could pass on to consumers in a different way." In 2021, she left the corporate life and launched Making Auto Easy, or Mae. While there are other online shopping tools out there, Liu notes that most of them focus on the end of the consumer journey: pushing product that dealerships have in inventory, not necessarily the cars that are best for consumers. "I really want to focus on the very beginning of the experience, where we nurture people to understand their options so they're making an informed decision." BOTTOM LINE : Mae offers over 1,500 car combinations to choose from, with six customized recommendations tailored to each buyer's preferences and budget; customers pay a one-time fee of $49 for the service. This year, Liu also introduced Canada's first-ever Women's Auto Show, based in Vancouver—an interactive event that brought 200 local women together to learn everything about car buying and maintenance, which generated over 80 leads and several paying custom- ers. The operation is completely bootstrapped, says Liu, with four team members (two full-time, two part- time). –M.O. Z A H O O R H A S S A N AGE: 29 Founder, Wythyn Beauty LIFE STORY: Zahoor Hassan was born in Vancouver, and her three-year- old plant-based haircare company is based in Langley. But the roots of Wythyn Beauty can be traced back to the hardscrabble journey of her immigrant parents, who fled war-torn Somalia to build a better life in B.C. for their children. "Growing up, my dad always instilled this message that the only way you can be financially free is to work for yourself," says Hassan. Her father, a freelance translator, passed away a couple years ago—which, Hassan says, proved the catalyst for Wythyn: "I had been working through different jobs, but his death forced me to say, Okay, this is where you need to go. And you need to do it now." She went back to school, studying at the Blanche Macdonald Centre, and began researching and developing a new formulation for shampoos borne out of her frustration with the natural products sector. "I wanted to make sure that every ingredient was not only completely plant-based, but also was doing something for the health of your hair," she says. Hassan settled on a 20-ingredient list, tested the product with friends and family, and eventually launched her e-commerce business in 2020. Three years later, Wythyn—a small-batch operator—remains very much a family affair, with Hassan sourcing all materials from the Pacific Northwest and producing each bottle herself, while her sister makes deliver- ies and her brother handles financials and analytics. BOTTOM LINE : Wythyn sells an eight-ounce bottle of shampoo and conditioner for $32 each. It sounds like a lot, but Hassan says that "custom- ers are aware of the differences between clean beauty products and drugstore brands." Wythyn was profitable within six months of launch, she notes, and profits have tripled in the past three years. Wythyn has also attracted the attention of a large international retailer through Wythyn's Instagram channel. Hassan expects that distribution deal to close by year's end, bringing Wythyn into the bricks-and-mortar world, and necessitating the hiring of a few help- ing hands to produce and distribute its product. –M.O. 60 BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2023