Determined to step into what he saw as an emerging e-commerce market, Sean Clark kicked off his footwear company Shoes.com from the basement of his parents’ Dunbar home.
Four years later, almost to the date, that same company now counts eight million customers, with annual sales of $300 million, and more than 600 staff.
And the growth keeps stepping up. This month, Shoes.com opened its first brick-and-mortar location on busy Queen Street West in Toronto, with a second Vancouver location slated to open on Burrard and Robson in the new year, where they’ll have a coffee shop and curated selection of shoes from the almost 500 brands they offer online.
“I think it’s all about, with Shoes.com, just making it more convenient for our customers; having a store where people can go in and speak to someone in person, and see and touch brands,” said Roger Hardy, co-founder and CEO of Shoes.com. “We really want to elevate the experience of online shopping and really make it this omni-channel idea where it is more than just an online presence.”
Clark and Hardy may have launched their latest venture from the ground up, but the pair has years of e-commerce experience. Hardy, the former CEO of Clearly Contacts, mentored and hired Clark, who worked for the Australian division of Clearly Contacts before he left to build the footwear website ShoeMe.ca, which later became part of Shoes.com.
With Shoes.com the focus is on providing a superior online shopping experience with free shipping for orders (even offering two-hour delivery, in some cases) and returns. The site offers a wide range of large mid-priced footwear (Steve Madden, Birkenstock, Frye, Sam Edelman) with a handful of designer labels (Chloé, Miu Miu). The site has technology that hones in and curates a selection of styles for individual customers.
“In e-commerce, service and selection are really the pillars of how you build an e-commerce company – I learned that at Clearly Contacts,” explains Clark, who came up with the idea to create an e-commerce footwear site after seeing a press release in 2011 announcing that online shoe and clothing shop Zappos was pulling out of Canada.
“I forwarded [the press release] to Roger and I said, ‘Roger, this is our shot, there’s no online footwear player in Canada,’” Clark recalls.
The other impetus for launching an e-commerce footwear site was Clark’s own days spent driving to Bellingham to pick up his then-girlfriend (now wife's) goods on the other side of the border.
“When I was driving down at the time, I was like, ‘Oh this is brutal, why am I doing this?’ I was like, ‘Look at what I am doing. There has got to be a better way.’ So that’s what kicked me into action.”
When it comes to online shopping in general, the US has a much larger market percentage. For example, just two per cent of Canada's $7-billion footwear market is purchased online compared to the United States where 19 per cent of its $45 billion in shoe sales are made online.
“I bet everything that I had that it’s going from two per cent to 10 per cent, and then [if it does] there is a $70-million opportunity just in Canada,” Clark says from the boardroom of the company’s Georgia Street head office – a long way from the basement.
A wall in the spacious office includes a picture of Clark’s mom, Teresa, a retired teacher who helped Clark fill out his first orders, when he didn’t even have stock, but had launched a $60 site just to test the waters for demand. The demand was there, and Clark spent those first weeks running around buying up and sending out the shoes online customers had ordered.
The other photo, a grinning Jon Austrom – today the director of operations – was Clark’s first paid employee, after responding to an ad that said: “Must have own laptop.” Austrom was hired at the company’s first “office,” the Blenz coffee shop on the corner of West 4th and Alma Street.
With such rapid growth and solid footing in the market – both in Canada and the US – the question is whether the company will go public this year.
“I think we would have been ready to go in early 2016 and pretty much everybody is now saying that the first half of 2016 looks bleak; I almost feel like it is becoming self-fulfilling,” Hardy says. “We’re kind of good to go, but it’s always subject to the market, but you also want to look at what’s the right time for the business. The business continues to grow very healthily in Canada, but it still is a fairly new and young business. Having said that, we are comfortable doing an IPO when the timing is right.”
If the market bounces back in the second half of next year it could be the right time to take the leap, he says.
In the meantime, Shoes.com continues to grow, having acquired California-born sock and accessories brand, Richer Poorer.
Whether it goes public next year or not, Shoes.com is clearly becoming another darling of Vancouver’s emerging tech start-up scene.
