Vancouver entrepreneur Roger Hardy plans to take his e-commerce shoe seller SHOEme public later this year, he told Business in Vancouver March 3.
The fast-growing company is on track to sell about $360 million worth of shoes this year with about 25% of that being in Canada.
“Our target is to get the IPO done in 2015,” he said. “Our growth is exceeding expectations and there seems to be a lot of interested investors who want to be a part of that.”
The name for the future public company would be Shoes.com Technologies Ltd. and it would include all of SHOEme’s current assets, such as the Shoes.com e-commerce site that the company bought in December as well as Vancouver’s SHOEme.ca and Seattle’s OnlineShoes.com.
Going public will give the company the resources it needs to continue to be acquisitive, Hardy said.
“We’re growing very quickly on our own through internal resources so going public is not a matter of needing capital,” he said. “Our history has been on generating good returns for shareholders so going public would be more about being a win-win for everybody.”
Hardy is an e-commerce veteran given that he founded Coastal Contacts in Vancouver in 2000, expanded the online eyewear-seller and then sold it for $430 million in April to France’s Essilor.
Last summer, he bought and merged both SHOEme.ca and OnlineShoes.com.
“The timing might be good for an IPO if market conditions stay robust,” he said. “That’s probably the take-away.”
