Healthy Growth Nets Online Retailer Well.ca $1.1 Million Private Financing
Guelph, Ontario (July 30, 2009) - Well.ca (http://Well.ca), Canada’s largest online health and beauty store, today announced that it has closed a $1.1 million private financing round to scale its warehousing and distribution capabilities, expand its product offering and add features to its website.
The Company was approached by several U.S. venture capitalists eager to participate in the round, but in the end decided to tap into its Canadian roots and raise the money at home. Well.ca considered several prominent Canadian venture capital options before ultimately opting to work with a handful of well-known angel investors, including several of Canada’s top technology entrepreneurs, as well as experts from the retail and drugstore verticals.
“The significant interest from venture capitalists, especially in a year when financings of Internet companies have declined dramatically, was a great validation for us,” said Ali Asaria, Well.ca’s founder and chief executive officer. “We were fortunate to be cash flow positive when we started meeting potential investors. As a result, we felt we could be far more selective than most companies, and cherry pick the best investors to help us evolve our offering and continue to exceed customer expectations. We’re absolutely delighted with the group we’ve been able to assemble, and we think they will have an enormous impact that goes well beyond what the money will buy.”
Toronto-based Thunder Road Capital, an investment company founded by former JumpTV CEO and eBay Canada managing director Jordan Banks, is the lead investor in the round. Banks, who will join the Well.ca board of directors effective immediately, also helped to introduce Well.ca to many of the other investors participating in the round.
“I’ve seen many creative strategies employed to capture the potential of online retailing over the years,” he said. “What sets Ali and the entire Well.ca team apart is the scalabilty of their amazing technology and their collective ability to execute, which are both used as a means to providing an incredibly rich and evolving customer experience,” said Banks.
The financing will help Well.ca continue to build on its impressive sales growth:
- Sales more than quadrupled between June 2008 and June 2009 and are doubling every four to five months.
- Well.ca visitor traffic in June 2009 rose 135 per cent from June 2008
- Total number of items shipped is almost 250,000.
Well.ca customers provide regular feedback to the company, and a portion of this financing will be directed at meeting some of their requests, including creating a “My Well.ca” area that can recall customers’ past purchases for faster reordering, and adding dynamic display shelves that make it easier to browse through the tremendous product offering.
Well.ca offers almost 18,000 non-prescription products - more SKUs available than at any other Canadian drugstore retailer - from its headquarters in downtown Guelph, Ontario, including its selection of more than 3,000 Green & Natural products (http://Well.ca/green). The company offers free shipping and returns to anywhere in the country.
“By offering customers a risk-free experience through our free shipping and returns policy, and making thousands of products available to cities and towns across Canada that don’t offer speciality items, Well.ca has found an untapped market,” Asaria said.
Some of the investors:Jordan Banks: managing partner of Thunder Road Capital, which advises and invests in early-stage technology companies. Past CEO of JumpTV (a leading Internet television carrier), and second employee of eBay Canada, where he was managing director.
- Hilton Silberg: an entrepreneur who founded the Day Night drugstore chain in the Hamilton area, which successfully competed with national chains for 17 years before he sold to Rexall Pharma Plus in 2007.
- Andrew Sloss: general manager of Kijiji Canada, Canada’s #1 online classifieds site, past country manager of eBay Canada, Canada’s #1 e-commerce site.
- David Ceolin: an expert in customer relationship management, founder of Digital Cement, a marketing services company acquired by Pitney Bowes in 2007, and author of internationally bestselling book on entrepreneurship, The Idea Guide.
About Well.ca:
Well.ca is Canada’s largest online health and beauty store. With almost 18,000 products from more than 1,000 brands, Well.ca carries everything from lipstick to toothpaste, baby powder to facial moisturizer. Orders ship free, with no minimum order size, to anywhere in Canada.
Well.ca was recognized in May 2009 by IDC as one of Ten Canadian Healthcare Solutions to Watch, and in July as “one of 20 companies that are driving innovation and changing the way we use the Internet” by Backbone Magazine and KPMG.
For more information:
Cheryl Kim
Edelman
416-979-1120, ext 305
