Illu s t r a t i o n : J a n ik S ö ll n e r/ N o u n P r oj e c t
THE
NBOX
i
The co-founder and chief
operating officer of a com-
pany with a market cap of
over $200 million is pound-
ing away on a keypad by a
warehouse door outside of
Vancouver's Broadway Tech
Centre in the middle of an
absolute downpour. The code
that Joseph Thompson is try-
ing to jam into the system isn't
working. After a dozen apolo-
gies and a quick phone call,
we're inside. "You changed
the code on me!" Thompson
says playfully to operations
manager Craig Culpan.
"You can never be too
careful," says Culpan, a former
member of the Canadian
national rugby team, through a
thick New Zealand accent.
Thompson would probably
agree with that general assess-
ment. In 2018, Roger Hardy,
founder of Coastal Contacts
and its well-known Clearly
brand (which he sold to French
optical firm Essilor for $445
million), recruited Thompson
and president Sabrina Liak to
help him launch a new com-
pany, Kits Eyecare.
Hardy, Thompson (who has
a background in e-commerce
with companies like Procter &
Gamble and Amazon) and Liak
(former managing director
at Goldman Sachs) took their
time, starting with contact
lenses and using that core of
vision-corrected customers to
move to glasses.
"One of the tricks of the
industry is that you have to
start with the manufactur-
ing," Thompson tells me at the
company's downtown offices
before we make the journey
east to the warehouse. "It's
counterintuitive, because
you'd like to learn how to sell
100 or 1,000 pairs of glasses
before investing millions in a
lab. The problem is that if you
do it that way, you've built a
marketing or retail organiza-
tion, and the profit is in the
lens. Before we sold our first
pair of glasses, we put a couple
million into the first version of
our lab."
When you do that, you get
to dictate the price point. And
Kits has been able to produce
a quality product at a dollar
value (most pairs of glasses are
$28) that's below most, if not
all, of the online competition.
That still raises the question
of how an eyewear company
can turn a profit when many
people have only one or two
pairs of glasses. But Kits has a
larger goal: to change custo-
mers' behaviour.
"We have this incredible
offer of putting quality glasses
in front of you for a low price,"
says head of product design
Edita Hadravska, a former
design director with Arc'teryx
LOOKING GOOD
Just over five years after launching, Kits Eyecare
has emerged as one of B.C.'s largest homegrown
retailers
by Nathan Caddell
R E TA I L
SEEING IS
BELIEVING
Kits's East Van ware-
house has a corner
where the design team
can work on glasses as
they are made
"
We have
this incred-
ible offer of
putting qual-
ity glasses
in front of
you for a low
price. So you
start treating
them as your
scarf."
