The vitamin business wasn't always popular. At one point, Bruce D. Reid, owner of Vitamin Shop in Victoria, remembers it was scoffed at.
Before Reid opened up shop in 1984, his father, a U.S. athlete was interested in the industry even though it was "a bit antisocial at the time" and a threat to big pharma, Reid said.
Cue to 2024: Vitamin Shop at 1212 Broad St. is now working to change its site to Shopify to accommodate the huge order influx and help protect against the huge increase in global cyber fraud that began during the pandemic.
While other businesses floundered during the pandemic, the shop saw a surge in online sales, marked with anxious people wanting antioxidants and other immune system boosters.
"We turned the internet on just 30 minutes every other day, and we would have all the orders that we could take," Reid said.
The shop was one of the earlier pioneers in the industry to use e-commerce. They started in 2000, five years after Amazon launched and just two years after PayPal. Even 10 years later in 2010, online shopping made up only just more than 6 per cent of all retail sales in the US.
"It was so early in internet sales in Canada that people just didn't compute to look at advertising online. So we kind of had to sell the internet. We would advertise it in magazines, in print, just to give people the confidence to go online to shop and that worked," added Reid.
To draw people in and make the process comfortable, Vitamin Shop let people phone in toll-free while using the website.
"It was novel. You know, people thought we were nuts, even people selling supplements online. But we kind of felt, just taking a look at [the U.S.], online shopping was just going crazy down there," said Reid. "About eight years after that, people caught on. And now it's just the way it's done. We invented in Canada the way that you sell supplements online."
In 2024, the business remains three-fold with over 30 employees. The largest portion of the business is in e-commerce, with about 200 orders online a day, and sells about 2/3 of that in stores, roughly equivalent to what they make via mail order. Between mail order and internet sales, over 60 per cent of the business is out of town, Reid said.
With the online industry now diluted with so many players, Vitamin Shop differentiates by having a model where people can still speak to someone on the phone.
It's part of the charm of a business that has been run for 40 years by the same family and with staff that Reid describes as "unbelievable team players that stayed with me for forever."
This article is from the 2024 edition of Best of the City.
