42 BCBusiness october 2016
WINNER
S
hoes.com has a typical
startup creation story.
In his Dunbar base-
ment suite ve years
ago, Sean Clark set
up a website o™er-
ing shoes he didn't own. He
bought Google AdWords
ads by credit card to direct
Canadian shoe-shoppers to
Shoeme.ca, and when the
orders started coming in,
he frantically drove around
Vancouver nding shoes to
repackage and send out.
But he had one benet
that would make him the
envy of every bootstrapping
entrepreneur: a partnership
with venture capitalist Roger
Hardy, who had already built
and sold Clearly Contacts, the
world's largest online empire
of contact lenses and eyewear.
They had met in 2010 through
a squash game, and Clark
later worked for Hardy and
opened up a Clearly Contacts
operation in Australia.
Clark, who was used to
driving across the U.S. border
with his wife to pick up
online shoe orders, wanted
to o™er Canadians the kind of
choice and speedy delivery
then available on U.S. sites
like Zappos and Amazon.
He trekked to shoe shows
all over the world, talking
directly to distributors and
convincing them to shift from
a traditional sales model, in
which they sold inventory to
retailers, and adopt a "drop
ship" model, in which they
ship directly to consumers
who have ordered from
Shoeme.
It worked. From its hum-
ble basement beginnings,
Shoeme steadily grew, and
in 2015 Hardy purchased the
online properties Shoes.com
and Onlineshoes.com and
expanded across the U.S. The
company, recently named the
top performing e-commerce
company in Canada by Inter-
net Retailer, ships an average
of 7,000 pairs of shoes a day.
The ever-expanding vir-
tual racks (over 500 brands,
30,000 styles) could easily
overwhelm a customer.
Aiming to tailor choices,
Shoes.com launched Smart
Shopper in November 2015.
The articial intelligence
technolo‹y, embedded in the
site, picks up on the visual
attributes that the shopper
prefers and suggests similar
products. "Over time, Smart
Shopper will also know the
designs you've looked at and
know the sizes that have
worked for you, and it will
also inform us on what we
should be showing you," says
Hardy. "So it's all about trying
to make it a really relevant
Roger Hardy + Sean Clark
CEO + CTO, Shoes.com
C O n S u M E r T E C h n O L O g y
