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/526329
72 BCBusiness july 2015 photo CourtESy of ShoEME.CA close—translated for the web. Prices were less than half of what optometrists were charging. By November, he had an offer from More.com—a company that aimed to be an online empire like Amazon— to buy the company. The terms of the deal have never been disclosed, but the sale allowed Hardy to buy his first home and invest in several other com- panies. The owners of More.com had raised $100 million in venture capital aimed at an IPO, and they wanted Hardy's company to be part of their online pharmacy, Planet RX. They had ads filmed in the Mir space sta- tion that were running on prime time dur- ing Friends and Ally McBeal. Hardy contin- ued working for the company, managing contact lens sales, but after Internet stocks crashed in March 2000, More.com was done. In August, Hardy bought back the lens business for a fraction of the original deal. Hardy's sister Michaela Tok a rsk i, a chem ica l engineer, was pursuing an MBA at UVic at the time. She negoti- ated a co-op term so she could help her brother start up the reborn company, this time named Coastal Contacts, in October 2000. Her husband, Derek, took charge of building and maintaining the website. (Their stepfather, Murray McBride, joined the Coastal board in the early years.) "The timing was perfect," says Hardy about his family joining the startup. "Sort of serendipitous." Coastal set up shop in another warehouse, with a computer, a ping-pong table and a door laid across two filing cabinets for a desk. The orders came in. "At one point we needed a bookkeeper," Tokarski recalls, "and Roger said, 'Does anyone know about accounting?' I said, 'I took one course,' and he said, 'You can do this. I know you can do this.' He just has this way of convincing you that you can do anything." But since the first iteration of the business had been launched, the web landscape had changed dramatically. An Internet search showed them 1,000 identifiable competitors, and investors were difficult to find after the tech crash. Hardy secured $170,000 from Tom Kusumoto of Mercury Partners, a Vancouver-based venture capital firm, and invested most of that money in inventory. "If I look at how we were able to make up that ground," Hardy says, "we invested in having the product on the shelves and in really fast shipping. Others focused on marketing but not on having the products, so it would take two weeks to get the lens. Our way was: we get it to you tomorrow morning." It was execution, more than innovation, that made Coastal Contacts work, says Ron Cenfetelli, who teaches e-commerce at U B C 's S auder School of Business. The model itself was essen- tially mimicking others like Amazon. "It's easy to look at it through today's lens and say, 'Somebody started selling contact lenses online, big deal.' But that was in the midst of a dot-com crash, and Can- ada was a backwater of Internet adop- tion. It was a gutsy thing to do." For years, Tokarski recalls, she and Roger and Derek would go to the ship- ping department every afternoon and pack boxes. "At the cutoff time the trucks would have to go, and everybody in the company would be in there. I think that kind of speaks to the environment he was trying to create. This is a team—and right now we need to focus on getting these boxes out the door." While there were trials along the way, including a drawn-out legal battle with the College of Opticians of British Columbia over Coastal's right to sell pre- scription lenses, there was no denying that demand was there for fast, home- delivered, well-priced contacts. For the first five years, Coastal Contacts grew at a compound annual rate of 92 per cent. In 2004, the company raised almost tHe AppRentICe Sean Clark, who began his career as an intern at Coastal, went on to launch Shoeme with Hardy's help Creative Corporate Team-Buildings