Business in Vancouver's “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Roger Hardy, who recently sold his company, Coastal Contacts Inc., to Essilor International for $430 million, talks about how he launched a successful e-commerce company in the middle of the dot-com crash.
“I started out of university working for a logistics and transportation company, then went to work for the marketing department for a contact lens company. Right around then, it was the Internet boom and I was struck by the idea that contacts were a frictiony, broken purchase process, and that the ability to service the customers was challenging, and maybe I could build a website and make it a little faster and easier for customers, and away we went.
“I sold it in December 1999, at the peak of all Internet valuations. The company I sold it to had hoped to go public. But by then the dot-com bubble had burst. That company went out of business and I reacquired the assets.
“Coastalcontacts.com launched in October of 2000. I basically funded it through friends and family and then through sales.
“The bubble was bursting but we had good sales traction out of the gate. It really seemed to resonate. We did $2.5 million in sales the first year. I think in Year 2 we did $10 million, so we had pretty good, aggressive growth.
“At the time, I was able to lock in the words ‘contact lenses' and ‘contact lens' on a bunch of different search engines. Whenever anyone searched ‘contact lens,' I was the one that showed up.
“That ended up kind of giving us an advantage to keep steadily growing our business and acquiring new customers for the first four or five years.
“We actually started off with the U.S., then moved into Canada about 2004. In 2004, we did a small IPO. We used that capital to buy inventory, for working capital, to hire great people and do some investments.
“The optometry community [in Canada] was a huge challenge because, of course, they loved defending their monopoly. They didn't think people should be able to buy contacts on the Internet, so they worked hard to stop that business model.
“The opticians in B.C. launched a lawsuit against us. We pushed for the law to be changed in B.C. when the opticians here in B.C. tried to suggest that we shouldn't be able to sell contact lenses.
“Glasses came along in around 2007, 2008. It was consumers saying to us, ‘Hey I love what you do with my contacts – I'm buying them half-price from you. Can you do something for me on glasses?' Initially we thought, ‘Well, we'd love to do something there, but it's tricky.'
“The company that inspired us at the time was Zappos.com, the online shoe sellers. We thought, ‘There's got to be a lot more sizes in shoes than there are in eyeglasses, and here these guys built this great shoe business.'
“It was never our goal to sell the business. It was always our goal to keep growing and serving customers.
“Our company really did make a difference. It changed the industry. That was always our goal – to keep doing that, and then along came Essilor International.”
