When Shireen Amijee got a chance to buy some used South Asian clothing last year, the Surrey resident decided to think big.
“My partner and I decided, aside from just wearing the clothes, that we would try to see if we could come up with a business model, and that’s basically the inspiration,” Amijee said.
The result is Desi Diva Couture, an online store that sells South Asian consignment by delivery. Amijee is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs operating small multinational companies that target markets abroad before establishing themselves locally.
Jim Pettinger, the founder of UCanTrade Inc., a business and logistics services company for Canadian importers and exporters, said as the Internet evolves, smaller businesses are trying to capitalize on the new world of trade, regardless of their size or scale.
He added that he’s seen a rise in small startups going straight out of the country with their products or services, especially to the United States.
“Basically, smaller and smaller companies can now be exporters,” Pettinger said. “It used to be you spend three or four years to break even in, say, Europe or South America or whatever international market. Now, especially in British Columbia, you can just pop over the border or wherever in a very sort of focused way with your product or service and start to break even almost immediately.”
He said with the low Canadian dollar, smaller companies like Amijee’s can get a profitable return selling niche products.
“A sale made in Canada is valued easily 15% less than if the same sale were made in the U.S.”
Pettinger said this is still happening despite recent shipping changes that include UPS (NYSE:UPS) and FedEx (NYSE:FDX) charging fees that take into account the dimensions of packages instead of shipping weight only.
He added that the weak Canadian dollar, which as of press time was hovering around US$0.76, coupled with reduced export tariffs courtesy of NAFTA, has helped offset higher shipping costs.
Pettinger said the Internet has opened a lot of doors for small to medium-sized companies, “and even [for] independent contractors, where people in some ways didn’t have to form a company in the normal way where you’d have bricks and mortar and employees. Now you could just be an entrepreneur and just stitch together a number of different contractors or outsourced partners.”
Amijee said Desi Diva Couture’s business plan is to source small but think big.
“Our goal is to get the local market to consign, because we have such a huge and growing South Asian population, and then to go to the international market with it.”
