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/1508543
50 BCBUSINESS.CA OCTOBER 2023 Sitting in his apartment on Vancouver's west side with a sly grin that warms the atmosphere, 80-year-old Watt's kindly dis- position is hard to square with his past life as a black-market marijuana distributor. Everything about the company he's since built is not just bonafide, but also impressive. It's managed to turn an honest profit in a tempestuous industry that is famously low on margin, as well as build an unbeatable global reputation. This despite the fact that Watt was never much of a skier himself. After graduating from UBC with a degree in English that he got on scholarship, he was sucked into the underworld of psyche- delics. But he maintained a keen interest in problem solving, so when friends Byron Gracie and Herb Lang proposed that ski boot liners—which were made out of carpet foam and pleather at the time—were ripe for reinvention, Watt's curiosity was piqued. He helped Lang import a container of foam samples from New Zealand and got to work. One of those samples, it came to pass, had a magical prop- erty: it wouldn't "pack out"—i.e., break down into a sloppy fit. The thermo-mouldable foam could completely fill the void between the foot and the plastic shell with a custom fit. It pro- vided a high level of comfort, outstanding energy transmission and amazing warmth. But it wasn't until Watt got arrested that he thought it could become a business. "Needless to say, I was in deep shit," he says plainly. Watt needed a job while he worked through his case, so he enlisted friends and family to glue liners together in a ware- house while he spent all his savings on the best defence lawyer in Vancouver. It worked—he got off with 18 months of electronic monitoring and vowed to turn a new leaf. "I felt so awful," he laments, "having put my future with my daughter at risk." Reduced to simpler means, he produced 300 pairs of liners that first year with a small production line that he moved into a warehouse basement on Vancouver's west side. Throughout, he custom moulded, or "cooked," the liners in his apartment stove, mostly for Blackcomb ski patrollers and industry professionals— insiders who could spread the word. Because the liners were made from a single piece of folded foam, they started out flat like a pancake and required expertise to form into shape. But, once the liners were fitted, skiers revered them as a godsend. This made Watt believe that pre-moulding liners could open up a market with original equipment manufacturers ( OEM) of ski boots. He hand-carved wooden models of feet and got busy figur- ing out a process to pre-mould on a mass scale. Once he had that process, he landed contracts to supply liners to ski-boot makers Raichle Switzerland and Nordica, at which point Gracie asked to be bought out. Nordica, meanwhile, tried to duplicate the liners in Europe as part of a licensing deal, but wasn't able to, so that contract ended. Next, Raichle Switzerland went bankrupt. It wasn't looking good—until a Japanese company resur- rected Raichle and offered Intuition $50,000 for exclusive rights, plus another $250,000 for delivery. Watt jumped at the deal, but Lang refused to sign it. He believed Intuition needed to experiment with different materials instead. "I had to meet with the guys from [Raichle]—very serious businessmen—at the Pan Pacific and give them back the cheque for $50,000," Watt remembers. Watt then scraped together the cash to buy Lang out and start over again, this time as Intuition's sole shareholder. It took some time, but he indeed established supply deals with many OEM brands, and the business was finally on its way. But that was only half the plan. He always saw his OEM buyers as publicity for aftermarket sales at the retail point, where Intuition could enjoy far bigger margins. That's why he never spent a single dollar on advertising. Doing personal fittings in Vancouver and giving away as many liners as possible was his main thrust for R&D and marketing. "When people heard about Intuition, maybe through the Yellow Pages or word of mouth, they'd end up in our dungeon basement," he says. "The people seeking us out tended to be high-level, crazy skiers. And then we'd just hang out for an hour or two and we'd have a relationship. And by the end of the hang- out, we'd say, Just take them and give us feedback." It turned out the foam was only part of the secret sauce— listening to people and what they wanted out of their liners was the other half. From there, the liners started to make their own waves in the ski world, and by 1997 Intuition had to move production to China to keep up with demand. Then, the you- know-what hit the fan again. Intuition's New Zealand supplier " When people heard about Intuition, maybe through the Yellow Pages or word of mouth, they'd end up in our dungeon basement. The people seeking us out tended to be high- level, crazy skiers. And then we'd just hang out for an hour or two and we'd have a relationship. And by the end of the hangout, we'd say, Just take them and give us feedback." L E A D E R S H I P