BCBusiness

Christine Day (a) CEO, Luvo Inc. InfluEnCE: After having turned yogawear maker Lululemon into a global phenomenon, Day hopes to work similar wonders with frozen gourmet foods. ThE panEl says: "She's really generous with her time and her ideas and eager to share her knowl- edge and wisdom." Ratana Stephens (b) Co-founder and co-CEO, Nature's Path Foods Inc. InfluEnCE: Along with hus- band Arran, Stephens has turned Nature's Path into North America's largest certified organic breakfast foods company. faCTOId: Stephens honed her business skills while running the Vancouver vegetarian restaurant Woodlands in the 1980s. Charlene Ripley (c) Executive vice presi- dent and general coun- sel, Goldcorp Inc. InfluEnCE: Ripley is one of the few women to hold a senior leader- ship role in the mining industry, guiding Gold- corp through the legal swamp of its disparate global operations. ThE panEl says: "I think she gets it, in terms of, you come into a community, you do the resource extraction–what do you do with the community after- ward? She takes a holistic approach to working with those communities, from start to finish." Shannon Wilson (d) founder and creative director, Kit and Ace InfluEnCE: As lead designer at Lululemon, Wil- son made yogawear cool, stylish and functional. Now, along with stepson J.J. Wilson, she has launched another clothing venture– this one focused on luxury casual apparel. faCTOId: Wilson estab- lished imagine1day, a chil- dren's educational charity focused on Ethiopia, with husband Chip in 2007. Susannah Pierce (e) director of external affairs, LNG Canada InfluEnCE: As the voice for one of the largest entrants into the LNG field (a consor- tium headed by Royal Dutch Shell PLC), Pierce is helping to set the terms of B.C.'s much-hoped-for liquefied natural gas industry. faCTOId: LNG Canada's plant in Kitimat could cost $40 billion, if built. Anne Giardini (f) Chancellor, Simon Fraser University InfluEnCE: In addition to her new position at SFU, Giardini remains a force within the forestry sector, where she was president of Weyerhaeuser Company Ltd. from 2008 to 2014. ThE panEl says: "She's the antithesis of a forestry executive in a lot of ways– which is probably what drove a lot of her success. She's very soft-spoken. She's very methodical." bcbusiness.ca june 2015 BCBusInEss 45 Kazuko Komatsu Owner and CEO, Pacific Western brewing Ltd. T he owner of B.C.'s largest indepen- dently owned brewer doesn't have much love for her craft-beer peers. "They study for a few months and call themselves a brewmaster," she says. "We are bringing in a new braumeis- ter from Germany. It takes eight years to become a braumeister," she says, pronouncing the word in her slow cadence. "I respect that attitude, that quality." It's that preoccupation with quality that has helped Kazuko Komatsu turn Paci€ic Western Brewing, a blue-collar brewery best known for introducing Canadians to pull-tab cans, into a rare global success story. Under Komatsu's ownership, the company (once known as Cariboo Brewing) has gone from near bankruptcy to annual sales of over $15 million by 2013, with almost half of that tied to the export market. After moving from Japan to Canada in 1975, Komatsu began buy- ing and exporting literally anything she could sell back home—everything from her- ring to peat moss to fashionable log homes. One of those products was Cariboo's dry beer. But by 1990, Cariboo's then-owners had run into serious •nancial di–culties; unionized employees had not been paid for months, and e˜orts to sell the opera- tion to its larger competitors—Labatt and Molson—had fallen ›at. Komatsu decided to pony up the cash to buy the company a year later, becoming the brewery's seventh and longest-serving owner. Komatsu immediately sought to bol- ster the brewery's exports to Japan, pursu- ing ISO 9002—a certi•cation of quality that was a near prerequisite for the notoriously €inicky Japanese consumer. The effort soon paid o˜: at its mid-'90s peak, Paci•c Western became the third most popular imported beer in Japan behind Budweiser and Heineken. While exports continue to Japan to this day, the company now also sells into the Russian, Chinese and Argen- tinian marketplaces, among others. The diminutive brewery baron attributes her business acumen to lessons learned from a small circle of mentors: her father, uncle and iconic businessman Jim Pattison, who taught her the value of tough- ness. "Business is very tough." —Jacob Parry manufacturing + natural resources MOST INFLUENTIAL WOMEN IN B.C. m a nufa c t uring+n at ur a l re s ourc e s (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

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