July 23, 2009

Focus on women in construction

Construction gear maker tickled pink with TV exposure

IAN HARVEY

correspondent

Marissa McTansey’s got an eye for pink and steel toes.

As the founder and president of Moxie Trades, she’s also got an eye for business and the brains under that pink or baby blue hard hat to take an idea and turn it into a global enterprise serving women in construction.

In just three years, she’s gone from looking for construction boots that would fit her to building a business that is reaching out to women in construction around the world with customers like Walmart, Zellers and Mister Safety Shoes.

Of late, she’s also had an assist from an appearance on the CBC’s hit show Dragon’s Den, in which would-be entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of hard- nosed investors.

Look beyond the pink and baby blue pastels, however, and you’ll see a woman primarily interested in defining and selling to what she sees as an underserved but rapidly growing market.

It started after the birth of her daughter, Francesca, and with a son, Carter, already at home, she needed to switch gears.

“I was at IBM and then after the birth of my baby I knew I didn’t want to go back to selling database software,” she says. “I saw an article about the Women’s Directorate trades program and it brought tears to my eyes and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Her intent was to get into the trades as a finish carpenter and painter — something she’d already started doing on her own. So every work day for five months she drove from her Whitby home to study at to the Centre for Skills Development and Training in Burlington, Ont.

In the meantime, however, she was side-tracked by her own frustration — and that of her female colleagues — in finding a pair of work boots that were comfortable enough to wear all day.

“They didn’t make work boots for women,” she says.

“So women bought men’s boots but they don’t really fit. Some were wearing three socks and others were getting blisters. I asked at Mark’s Work Warehouse and they told me they get requests all the time for pink or ladies’ work boots but they didn’t have any.”

Her plan was simply to source some boots for herself but the trail led to China where a single manufacturer bothered to respond to her e-mails. Within a few months, she had 30 samples based on her design shipped to Canada.

“All I was going to do was sell the samples and pay for a couple of pairs of boots myself,” she says.

However, with her sales background she did some market research and though the information was sketchy on retail sales — since a men’s work boot shows up as a sale but doesn’t identify gender – Industry Canada furnished some intriguing statistics on the growing trend of women in the workforce.

Her first real break came when she met Home Depot Canada’s president Annette Verschuren and sent her a pair of pink work boots along with flowers and cupcakes. Verschuren took a chance and put the boots online where they’ve started to sell, attracting the attention of Walmart Canada and Zellers. She’s now trying to break into the U.S. and has set up special shipping to Australia.

“I think its crazy,” she laughs. “I’d never buy a pair of boots online. But you know we’ve had so few returns I can count them on my hand.”

With five full-time staff and four contract workers, her business is still in growth mode.

Her big break came against the grain; She’d been called to help out screening hopefuls on Dragon’s Den but didn’t want to put herself forward as a contestant.

“Then they called and said they’d booked me in the following Monday,” she says. “I said sure, but I wanted to bring some women with me. I had 65 lined up but they made me cut it back to 35 to fit on the stage. It was great. So now I have Brett W. Wilson (the prominent Calgary-based engineer and investment banker who founded FirstEnergy Capital Corp.) as my backer and he’s a dream to work with.”

The pink work boots have evolved into a brand, Tomboy Trades as well as Moxie Trades and expanded beyond pink to black and baby blue and into tool belts, safety glasses, work apparel, safety harnesses and more along with a sassy logo evocative of Charlie’s Angels with a hammer and saw replacing the guns.

“This isn’t my idea of what I wanted to do,” she says. “But it’s working.”

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