With Halloween just a few weeks away, Josh Bluman and Jackson Cunningham are in the midst of the busiest period their 18-month-old company has ever experienced.
Vivo Masks’ two-man operation bounces between apartment buildings in Vancouver. Thankfully, its business model doesn’t require the entrepreneurs to stockpile their signature masquerade masks in their homes.
“We’re not mask people,” Bluman told Business in Vancouver, adding the pair rarely comes in contact with their own products.
Instead, the co-founders of the online retailer rely on an Italian masquerade mask dealer to send their orders to a third-party fulfilment centre.
“[We] imagined ourselves in the minds of customers going to these prestigious masquerade balls and just kind of thought, ‘If I were to drop $100 on a mask, what would I want to buy?’” 27-year-old Bluman said.
The fulfilment centre then ships to U.S. customers who can’t find the high-end European masks on this side of the pond. It’s a model that helps keep overhead low, partly by avoiding Canada’s high shipping costs.
And it’s turned into a much smoother operation following their first, rather nightmarish, Halloween working with a different fulfilment centre.
“There were actually quite a few mistakes and missed orders to some of our first early customers,” Bluman recalled. “[The fulfilment centre] dropped the ball in many, many ways.”
Since finding a new fulfilment centre, major orders for New Year’s Eve, Mardi Gras and Carnival have gone much better.
It was a steep learning curve for the pair, who had no previous interest in masks, but Cunningham said as an entrepreneur he’d rather learn from a bad result rather than never try anything risky and get no result.
Before Vivo Masks, the 28-year-old was a mortgage broker offering online services to customers.
“It wasn’t the mortgage stuff that interested me more than the aspect of marketing [the business] ,” Cunningham said.
He reached out to marketing expert Bluman for help with his online mortgage business and the two quickly realized they followed the same bloggers and had similar visions when it came to small businesses.
That’s when, on a whim, Cunningham pitched Bluman a business idea he had stumbled upon accidentally.
When searching online to gauge interest in scary latex masks, Cunningham discovered there was actually a significant niche market for high-end masquerade masks.
“It ended up being masks; it could have been flower baskets or cuckoo clocks,” he said, adding his goal was to find an underserved market for a product.
After that, the objective was to make the business nearly automated and keep costs low by enlisting outsourcing partners to manage everything from Web development to writing content.
Both Cunningham and Bluman said the business model with Vivo Masks has been so successful that they’re getting ready to launch other online retail sites featuring high-end suspenders and top hats.
“We met randomly and now we’re working together every day,” Cunningham said.
“It was really lucky. I look back on it now and I’m like, ‘Oh, man, it would suck to be stuck with a partner who turned out to not really mesh.’ And instead, it’s perfect.”
