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/290301
52 BCBusiness April 2014 J uice cleanses are now all the rage, but when Zach Berman and business partner Ryan Slater launched the Juice Truck in 2011 the two were breaking new ground in Canada. And they're keeping the pedal to the metal in order to maintain their early-adopter advantage: in just two-and-a-half years the company has grown to a staff of 10, and it is currently building a 5,000-square-foot produc- tion facility in Vancouver to keep up with demand. BCBusiness caught up with Berman for the inside scoop on the Juice Truck. Why Juice? My business partner and I travelled for a year to India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. There was a kind of community surrounding the juice carts there, so we got into the juicing culture. What is cold-press juice? With cold-press juice you are pressing the fruit and vegetables, versus a fast-turning blade. Because there is no heat involved, you maintain all the enzymes and nutrients. We were the first people to do cold-pressed juice in Canada. How are you expanding beyond the food truck? Our new 5,000-square-foot space will include a storefront where there will be juices and food fol- lowing our healthy mandate, as well as a commu- nity space for workshops. —A.W. L ike a lot of successful entre- preneurs, Kyle Vucko faced a problem, a friction point in his personal life that he figured others were probably facing, too. As a UVic business student nearing graduation, he found that well-made custom suits were too pricey for young men like himself, and buying a cheap suit cost the same after tailoring. So he dropped out of business school with one semester left and headed to Shanghai in search of tailors spe- cializing in custom clothing. What was supposed to be a two-week trip turned into three years. "It was very real. These guys were showing up on tricycles with garments hanging on the back of their bikes," Vucko recalls. He set about creating Indochino, an online retailer that sells customized men's suits for a fraction of the cost traditionally associated with custom-tailored suits. The problem was that no factories were doing custom cloth- ing on a large scale, so Vucko had to raise millions through investors to support the idea of building what he calls the supply chain of the future for custom clothing. Despite his local fame, Vucko credits his success with teamwork and a lot of hard work. "There's the myth of the kid that drops out of college and becomes Mark Zuckerberg and starts Facebook or Apple, and people will connect you with those dots whether it's true or not," he says. Vucko says that while the par- ents of his generation worked hard to get out of a suit, now, thanks to shows such as Mad Men and James Bond, there's a trend to get back into one, but the key to a good suit is a good fit. "All we're trying to do is make it easy for guys to get dressed," says Vucko, while sipping tea at a Yaletown café. "Men are allowed to be more three-dimensional and there's kind of a redefined mascu- linity. I think caring about how you look is starting to come into that." Vucko has come a long way from negotiating contracts with body language and a calcula- tor. Since its conception in 2007 Indochino has enabled more than 120,000 men worldwide to look dapper on a budget, and today he's talking to some of the biggest garment factories in the world. "We have a shot to change the way guys dress, and we have a shot to change an industry," he says. –A.W. Zach Berman Co-owner, Juice Truck Enterprises Ltd. Age: 28 Kyle Vucko CEO and Co-founder, Indochino Apparel Inc. Age: 28 30 UNDER 30 p38-67_30Under30_april.indd 52 2014-03-07 3:26 PM