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bcbusiness.ca July 2014 BCBusiness 55 stake in Luvo, joined the company on a part-time basis in April and takes the reins full-time this fall. She has three children, the youngest a 14-year-old, and had promised her husband she'd take a year off , which is why her full-time arrival at Luvo is being delayed. Sidwell— who started courting Day for the job shortly after her departure from Lulule- mon was announced—has always had British Colum- bian connections, but Day, who will be based in Rich- mond, also brings deep ties to the province, ones that aren't widely known. When she was two, her family relo- cated to Vancouver from Northern Ire- land, where her engineer father had been a teammate of footballer Georgie Best before blowing out his knee. That stint lasted only three years, but sev- eral members of the extended family live here, and Day's own family later landed in Seattle, where she attended high school and then college, graduat- ing with a degree in accounting. While still in her twenties she helped Howard Shultz raise the money that would ulti- mately lead to the founding of the Star- bucks chain, where she spent almost two decades and occupied various senior positions. The move to Lulule- mon was just a short jaunt up a freeway that she'd driven dozens of times before. The challenge at Luvo may be less about creating a category and stok- ing a market, as Starbucks did to an extent and Lululemon absolutely did, than about being the company that emerges from among many to own it. For that challenge Day sees Luvo as being extremely well positioned. "Even though it's early stage, the management team is very talented and very industry savvy," she says. Sidwell has said that while the company is currently well capitalized, it would consider a public off ering if conditions warrant, eliminat- ing another barrier to growth. And of course there are Day and Sidwell, who have the track records but also the passion and purpose, words that they are not shy about using. Day talks about visiting her mother-in-law in the hospital, seeing what she was being given to eat, and vowing that things there were going to change, and soon. Getting Luvo food into hospitals is now a personal priority for her. Meanwhile, Sidwell swears that eat- ing better has done nothing less than transform his life. Now, when travel- ling, he has Luvo products shipped ahead to the hotels he's staying at. He isn't going back to the old diet, and he doesn't think we should either: "We are trying to change the perception of food in North America." ■ The challenge at Luvo may be less about creating a category and stoking a market, as Starbucks did to an extent and Lululemon absolutely did, than about being the company that emerges from among many to own it p048-055-Luvo_july.indd 55 2014-05-29 3:58 PM