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Roger Hardy is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years\\u2019 experience building several technology businesses to successful exits. Hardy founded Coastal Contacts Inc. in 2000, instantly re-writing the business model for contact lens sales and delivery. Drawing from his previous logistics expertise and industry knowledge, Roger seized the newly emerging e-commerce revolution. Roger led Coastal to become the largest online retailer of eyewear and vision related products until it was acquired by Essilor International in what was the largest e-commerce transaction in Canadian history at the time.

In 2018 Roger co-founded KITS Eyewear Ltd. alongside Joseph Thompson and Sabrina Liak. As CEO, Hardy has led KITS through unprecedented growth with a 47% year over year revenue increase.

Most passionate about

• We built Coastal Contacts, my sister and I, from startup to a NASDAQ-listed public company and then sold it in 2014, for almost half a billion dollars.
• Since then, we've been doing investments in real estate and technology.
• We kept coming back to the optical category. We were excited about the opportunity in optical. It has always gotten us interested in trying to serve customers in a way that exceeded their expectations.
• We've been working on KITS Eyecare here out of Vancouver, Canada, mostly focused on the eye care business for North America.

Roger\\u2019s career and story

• I worked in the vision category, and while I was working there, I was struck by the fact that I felt that customers were underserved. I think part of it was the timing. The internet was just getting going. And so, like I said, my sister and I built a website and started selling contact lenses.
• The first day, we had 16 orders. In the first month we had 70,000 in sales, and in the first year we had two and a half million in sales. In the second year, we had 10 million in sales. So, we really knew there was an unmet need in terms of savings and convenience for customers. At that time, the technology innovation was just a website\\u2014just putting it online.
• Today, I think the real technology innovation, like I said, that eye exam just makes it easier for customers to do it online from home or the office, anytime, 24/7, day or night. They can really step into that.
• The first thing we worked on was growing our subscription business for contact lenses. Today, that's about 25% of our company. The second thing we worked on is vertical integration. We made sure that we had the most technologically advanced optical lab in North America.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Build businesses that serve customers. I think NPS is a great measure to use.
• What we find is that the more we can focus on and listen to customers and remove any challenges in our business, it takes the experience up for customers. That ultimately is a driver of financial results. It's our opinion that the company with the highest NPS in every category ultimately has the highest value in that category.
• I would put it as: You want to be getting direct feedback from your customers. You want to be removing all the choke points, anything that's friction, anything that they tell you is even a slight displeasure. You want every customer to be wowed by the experience of being served by you.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I don't want to name names, but we used a payments company that we thought of as being very innovative.
• We did the due diligence on the company. We thought, \\u2018These guys are really cutting edge and customers are gonna love this.\\u2019 It was a different way of making payments and it was on the front. But that company kind of overstated what they could do. Ultimately, it was a significant cost for us.
• They had problems processing..."