Behind the alterations counter, and every counter since

My mother ran an alterations counter in St. Boniface, the French-speaking quarter of Winnipeg, and most of what crossed it in winter was outerwear: zips that had failed at forty below, cuffs worn through by snow-blower handles, a parka someone's grandfather had owned. I sat behind that counter after school, writing tickets in two languages, because half her customers spoke French and the other half apologised for not speaking it. I learnt early that people keep a good coat longer than a shop expects them to, and that they will tell you exactly what went wrong with it if you ask.

I studied industrial engineering at Ellesward University in Winnipeg and graduated in 2000. My first job was at the Assiniford Catalogue Company, which still sold clothing and household goods by printed catalogue and telephone across the Prairies and the North. I was posted to its returns centre. More than a million parcels came back each year, and in my first months I opened hundreds of them myself. A large share of the clothing came back because it did not fit, and the catalogue printed one size chart for every brand it carried. I redesigned how returns were sorted and cut the time from receipt to refund from nine days to four. The more lasting lesson was that every returned parcel was a comment on a page somebody had written months earlier.

In 2004 I moved to Mississauga to work on warehouse systems for Quillhaven Sports Distribution, which supplied bicycles, skis and camping gear to about 1,900 independent shops. We replaced its warehouse management system and introduced cycle counting, and location-level record accuracy rose from 91 per cent to above 99. I also built my first customer-facing product there: a stock-check portal that let a shop owner see what we actually held before promising it to a customer. Dealers used it more than anything else we gave them, which told me where my interest lay.

Delacourt & Finch, a family-owned Toronto department-store chain, hired me in 2009 to help launch its online store. We went live in 2010 in English and French, because the chain had stores in Québec, and by 2014 online sales had reached C$96 million. The episode I learnt most from was a failure. In 2012 we let customers order from store stock for home delivery, and 18 per cent of those orders were cancelled because the item was not where the system said it was. We stopped the pilot. I spent my evenings in those years completing a part-time graduate diploma in human–computer interaction at the Callowford Institute of Design, and I came out of both experiences convinced that no interface could rescue a count the store itself did not believe.

In 2014 I went to Montréal to work on that problem at its source. Brisevent Commerce was a young company making order-management and store-inventory software for retailers, and I joined as director of product for store availability. We built an app that told associates which shelves to count each morning, ranked by the risk of a wrong figure, and a confidence score that retailers could consult before showing stock online. I recovered the French I had half-lost since school, first in meetings and then in product reviews with Québec clients who were rightly unwilling to accept their language as an afterthought. I became vice-president of product in 2018. When stores closed in the spring of 2020, our clients' click-and-collect volumes rose ninefold within weeks, and the software held because the counting habits had been built first.

Sablemere was one of Brisevent's clients. In 2021 its chief executive asked me to become the company's first chief product officer, responsible for the website, the app, the tools our store associates use and a repair and resale service that existed then mostly as an intention. I accepted because I wanted to own the whole promise to a customer, not supply one part of it to somebody else.

I lead 148 people in product management, design and research, content and localisation, personalisation and analytics, and accessibility. Our engineers report to the chief technology officer, and we work in shared teams. I hold product reviews in stores and at our repair centres in Vancouver and Montréal more often than at head office, and I read about fifty customer contacts every week, chosen at random by our care team rather than by me. I present to our board at each of its six meetings a year and report twice a year to its Audit and Risk Committee on privacy, accessibility and the membership changes.

Inside Canadian retail I am probably known for three positions that cost money before they paid: that an availability claim is a promise to be rationed, that a used product needs a grading language before it needs a marketplace, and that a customer should be able to leave a paid programme as easily as they joined it. I hold them because I have opened the parcels, sat behind the counter and watched what happens when a promise is broken. I am now preparing to bring the same habits to a boardroom, as an independent director.

Open to Board appointments · Speaking invitations · Executive opportunities

Languages / English · French