Saje Natural Wellness on a growth spurt
Kate Ross LeBlanc grew up helping out in the aisles of her mother’s fabric store in southwestern Ontario, so she’s no stranger to making retail a family affair.
“I always had a romantic love of retail,” said Ross LeBlanc, chief executive of Vancouver-based chain Saje Natural Wellness, which she founded with her husband Jean-Pierre LeBlanc in 1992. That passion for retail has passed on to their 25-year-old daughter, Kiara LeBlanc, who is the company’s creative director in charge of design and product.
“Kiara worked from the time that she was 12,” Ross LeBlanc said. “She has always had an innate sense of design and interests in colour palettes.”
That shared family effort has helped catapult the retailer of essential oils and assorted wellness products from one store in North Vancouver to a business with 29 locations across the country, including three in Edmonton, and seven more planned to open in 2015. Saje Natural Wellness has been on a more-rapid growth trajectory in the past four years and has doubled its sales every year for the past three years. Sales are expected to hit $50 million this fiscal year.
Ross LeBlanc said working well together as a family hinges on being able to recognize the unique qualities she and her and daughter bring as individuals to the business. It’s a practice she and her husband first embraced when they decided to move to Vancouver from Toronto in the early 1990s and start the company.
LeBlanc had a background in chemistry, and wanted to experiment with alternative healing therapies for chronic pain, something he endured after a car accident left lingering soft tissue damage. “He was ahead of the curve in terms of using things from nature as healing modalities on your body,” Ross LeBlanc said.
She has always focused primarily on retail business fundamentals, while her husband, who holds the title of “chief wellness officer,” focuses on marketing the brand and holding wellness seminars for large groups of people inside Saje’s stores. “He infuses the whole company culture with a sense of wellness,” she said.
The couple started the business using equity from the sale of their home in Toronto, some savings, loans from family members and “as many credit cards as we could get our hands on,” she said, laughing.
They set out to develop a line of products using all natural ingredients: all products are free of parabens, sodium laureth sulphate, glycols, petrochemicals and synthetic colours, and fragrances. Their first store sold eight proprietary products, including two essential oils — Peppermint Halo, which helps to treat headaches, and Stress Release, which has lavender and camomile — that are still top sellers today. Since then the business has expanded beyond essential oils to include more than 500 products, ranging from skin-care products, to candles and teas.
In 2011, when the company had nine stores, Ross LeBlanc said the family embarked on a plan to expand the brand, taking a look inward for inspiration. “We decided we wanted to establish and identify what our values were internally, and we wanted those to be real, not aspirational — the things that we value based on our actions.”
Wellness was one. “The next thing was what we call ‘awesomeness’ — it’s really the permission for each other to create things that are absolutely awesome, and reach for greatness in that.” The third was a commitment to growth, both for the company and its employees’ personal growth.
“We have a real value of celebration,” Ross LeBlanc said. “We take every opportunity to celebrate each others’ successes.”
It hasn’t all been a smooth ride, though. “We’ve certainly overcome our share of struggles with red ink for long periods; particularly in the early years,” Ross LeBlanc said. But as the brand momentum snowballed and consumer demand for wellness products grew, the company has experienced “healthy profits” for years, she added.
Last year, Saje Natural Wellness was listed on the Profit 500 ranking as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies, with a five-year growth rate of 267 per cent.
Saje’s founders plan to open 50 stores in Canada by the end of 2016, before looking to break into international markets. This year’s retail expansion will bring them coast-to-coast with a new storefront in St. John’s, N.L.
And new product categories will be considered, Ross LeBlanc said. “We are always freshening up the brand and doing new product introductions and there are certainly other product categories that would fall within wellness products that we may expand into,” she said.
We’ve certainly overcome our share of struggles with red ink for long periods