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
july 2015 BCBusiness 77 BCBuSINESS.CA one of Shoeme's warehouses is located, customers are now getting same-day delivery. Shoeme also features its own brand, called Pika, which offers trendy items like vintage backpacks and cork- bed shoes at attractive prices. Hardy has plans to open retail shoe stores soon—following the Coastal path of online to bricks-and-mortar. But it will be something quite different. He likes the idea of changing the entire stock every week. Commerce now is omnichannel: in store, at home, on mobile. Retail, he says, is going beyond the traditional store, w h i c h m e a s u r e s itself strictly in sales. He points a few m i l e s n o r t h t o Venice Beach's Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which calls itself "the coolest block in America." The pre- cious little shops and restaurants in renovated beach houses include Toms, whose can- vas shoes with braided cord sole are ubiquitous on the sidewalks outside. Inside the store, however, the shoes are hard to find. It seems like your local cof- fee shop, selling espresso and magazines, with non- chalantly beautiful peo- ple chatting in groups or poking at their laptops. It's only on the store's back patio, near a turf area where children are play- ing, that a shopper finds a tent with all the shoes. The brand, apparently, is not what you wear but who you are. When Hardy talks about his growing shoe empire, I'm reminded of Jeffrey Mason's comments. The former Coastal board member says he first thought that Hardy's management style was too detailed; he knew exactly what the ship- ping clerk or the receptionist was doing. "When I first went in I said, 'You've got to step back. You need people to do their jobs and you focus on the value added.' But I think he feels compelled to under- stand how all the pieces fit together. I think some CEOs, they become discon- nected. It's like a layer with the firm below, and they spearhead things and information goes back and forth. I think the modern firm is more flat and more connected. He really sees both the forest and the trees." As we're talking, Hardy keeps glanc- ing out the window to see his wife, Jenny, whom he met when she was communi- cations manager at Coastal, and their two blond children play i ng on t he beach. But he gets excited about the conversation when he talks about how the three shoe sites can improve. One area needs work: 20 per cent of shoes are returned. I see what Mason means about the forest and the trees: when Hardy talks about overall sales, he talks about the indi- vidual customer. That's me. "With the amount of data we have about you, you should never have to return," he says. "My view is that there's been no innovation in this category for seven years. We will hyper- invest to make sure we have a collection that is better than everybody else's for you. I'm going to show you the 12 shoes, based on 3,000 other people just like you who also ordered pairs just like you. I will curate a collection that's guaranteed to fit. It's more than just fit. Fit is phase one. Love is phase two." I'm getting excited too, picturing my ideal collection of 12 shoes, curated just for me by Roger Hardy. I confess to him that just last week, I bought a pair of red leather sneakers on Shoeme. He leans over to admire them and guesses at the brand. "See? Out of all this," he says, "a sale." ■"My view is that there's been no innovation in this category for seven years," says Hardy. "We will hyper-invest to make sure we have a collec- tion that is better than everybody else's for you"