He’s gliding smoothly toward success
Original product is growing in the shaving world
Think of an idea. Come up with a prototype. Win business awards. Reinvest in the product. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That was the path to success for Nick May, a 27-year-old Ottawa entrepreneur who turned his high school idea of a shaving gel in bar form into a product that’s taken the personal hygiene world by storm.
The idea for a bar-form gel came to May when he started shaving at 14 and found shaving cream to be unwieldy. After taking some chemistry classes at Carleton University, he decided to try his hand at making his idea a reality, and the resulting product started him down the road to creating his own business.
“I made the prototypes, then got it into some local stores — 13 or so local stores,” said May. “Then I started entering university business competitions, and I won them. Then I would take some of my money I would get, re-invest it into the company, and just keep slowly changing a paper clip to a house.”
From there, May kept chipping away at his idea, fine-tuning and perfecting his prototypes until he was satisfied.
“It started off as a fun thing,” he said, “and then I kept working at it, slowly but surely.”
In addition to a strong support system, including his brother Stephan and mentor Sandy MacPherson, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Invest Ottawa, May credits his appearance on CBC’s Dragons’ Den in 2013 as an experience that helped put him even more on the map.
But, he said, the deal as it was shown on the show didn’t end up panning out. So, following the same attitude that got him up to that point, May went out and got what he needed on his own.
“I ended up going and getting my own financing and finding my own distribution partner without their help,” said May, who initially agreed with two of CBC’s Dragons on a deal that would earn him $50,000 for 25 per cent of the company and an agreement that the Dragons would help him find distributors.
“I wound up doing it on my own and keeping all the equity,” he said. “It was in my favour to not (do the full deal.)”
It took May three years to go from the initial design of the product — a design similar to a bar of deodorant — to the more ergonomically friendly egg shape it takes today. The new look, which was finalized in February 2015, he said, was decided upon after design classes taught him the importance of functionality and that a deodorant-style approach was not ideal for use with his shave gel.
“(Deodorant packaging) is not intended to sit in the shower with the water on it and whatnot,” he said. “So you have to design the packaging in a different way, with different surface areas.”
May’s rise in the shaving industry continues, with his Remay shave gel bars now stocked in more than 700 retail stores, including participating Loblaws and Real Canadian Superstores.
But despite his accolades — including being named the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s 2013 Young Entrepreneur of the Year — May still remembers what it was like to start a business from the ground up, and urges anyone with a business idea to act on it.
“Take advantage of the programs in your school,” he said. “Whether it’s college or at the university, there’s design class, there’s other students, there’s engineering classes, there’s possibly business competitions. Absolutely take part in all those … and go around talking, networking with other teachers and professors. They’ll help point you in the right direction.”