Shopify powering hoverboard craze
TORONTO — Outside his condo in downtown Toronto — which is also his sales centre, warehouse and logistics hub — Darren Pereira is giving a hoverboard lesson.
A young woman steps onto the two-wheeled scooter, crying out and laughing when it instantly starts to move. “There you go. Oh, you’ve got a good strong core!” Pereira says, walking backwards in front of her so she has a shoulder to grab if she loses her balance from what he calls “hover legs,” the shaky feeling people experience when they’re trying a hoverboard for the first time.
“Wherever you look, that’s where you’re going to go. It’s freaky, huh?” he says. “Another safe lesson. Take a break now.”
Pereira, 40, is a hoverboard entrepreneur — as well as “a publicist, deal negotiator, artist liaison, iPhone app architect, customer service manager, merchandise director, creative writer, shipping & tour manager,” according to his LinkedIn profile. He’s decked out, head-to-toe, in gear from a clothing line he also promotes.
The woman getting the hover lesson heard through a friend that she could try out the gadget popularized by the Instagram and Twitter accounts of Justin Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Wiz Khalifa, so here she is, at 10 a.m. on a Monday. Such is the allure of the hoverlife.
When Pereira saw the self-balancing motorized scooters at a conference last February, he knew they were going to be the next big thing. So he tracked down Chinese manufacturer Cube Electronics Tech, placed an order for five hoverboards and set up a website to sell them. Just like that, Pereira was a hoverboard retailer, and Hüüvr (pronounced hover) was born.
Hoverboards may be this year’s hottest Christmas toy, but they can’t be found at most major stores, for reasons ranging from patent disputes to concerns over personal injury liability to their batteries’ annoying tendency to catch fire and explode. Just this week, Ama- zon.com Inc. warned customers to throw away certain models linked to safety concerns.
But behind the scenes, a Canadian company is helping small merchants, such as Pereira, willing to fill the void left by the likes of Walmart Inc. and Target Corp.
That company is Ottawa’s Shopify Inc., which provides would-be merchants with the software to set up an online store, accept payments and track orders, for as little as $9 a month. The company says about 200 of Shopify’s 200,000-plus stores are selling hoverboards, including modahoverboards.com (which bills itself as a vendor of “designer hoverboards for exquisite taste”), and hoverwheelz.net.
Pereira says huuvr.com is currently powered by a mix of PayPal and some do-it-yourself code, but he’s planning to start using Shopify next year as his selection of products expands. If he had to rely on bricks- and- mortar stores to sell hoverboards, he says his business couldn’t exist.
“No way,” Pereira says.
“It wouldn’t be possible. Thank God for online merchants.”
Harley Finkelstein was once one of those online merchants, putting himself through law school selling T-shirts on the web. Today, he’s Shopify’s chief platform officer, in charge of sales and business development. In good weather, he commutes to work along the Rideau Canal on a ZBoard, a motorized skateboard that was a predecessor to the hoverboard.
Finkelstein says it’s been exciting to watch social media fuelled interest in hoverboards grow and Shopify sites selling them grow along with it. He says there are plenty of examples of people with a good idea and an entrepreneurial spirit using Shopify to form their own distribution channel, but the hoverboard phenomenon is unique.
“This odd piece of technology entered our lives like a bat out of hell,” Finkelstein says. “By the time we realized what was happening, everyone we knew was talking about it.”
Finkelstein says the changing world of e-commerce is good for everyone except the middlemen — retailers who aren’t adding much value beyond acting as distributors. He cites the common experience of trying to ask an employee a question about a product at a big box store and being met with a blank stare.
“A lot of these hoverboards are coming directly out of the factory and into the hands of consumers,” he says. “If I have a problem with the hoverboard, I’m able to call the person who actually had some- thing to do with building the hoverboard, not some random, thirdparty intermediary.”
But in a world where anyone can buy the latest trendy gadget directly from a factory in Shenzhen, China, and set up a Shopify site to sell it in minutes, retailers aren’t the only potential losers.
With new stores popping up as quickly as lawyers can send ceaseand-desist letters, anyone laying claim to having invented the trendy gadget is playing a high-stakes version of Whack-a-Mole.