Drew Green replaces Kyle Vucko as Indochino CEO

New Indochino CEO Drew Green

Company founder Vucko is returning to his roots in Victoria

After nearly a decade at the helm of Indochino, Victoria native Kyle Vucko is stepping down as CEO to make way for retail and Internet veteran Drew Green.

Vucko, a 2014 BCBusiness 30 Under 30 award winner, started the online apparel company in 2007 with his University of Victoria business program classmate Heikal Gani to sell made-to-measure suits for less than the usual cost of custom-tailored ones. Green takes over the company as it increasingly emerges as an omni-channel apparel brand with showrooms in Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

Indochino raised $13 million in a Series B round of funding led by Boston-based Highland Capital Partners in 2013 and currently has around 140,000 customers—a figure the nearly 200-employee-strong company now wants to push to a million by 2020, along with significantly expanding the company’s online and physical retail presence through domestic and international strategic partners. It is also gearing up to expand the product catalogue.

Explaining there was a year-long process, via a global search firm, to find “a CEO of the calibre that we want and for the scale of the company and where we want to take it,” Vucko says Green’s experience covers the changing facets of the business. Green is the former (and founding) CEO and chairman of shop.ca, one of Canada’s largest online and multi-category retailers. His resume also includes leadership roles at FloNetwork, later acquired by DoubleClick; DoubleClick (bought by Google); and shop.com (now owned by Market America).

“We’re in a bit of a rare space because we’re apparel and fashion but we’ve got technology and we’re also now in retail, and we’re leading omni-commerce,” says Vucko, who remains an investor and advisor. “He’s got some really, really big plans for the company which I’m fully supportive of.”

Vucko, who recently married, is returning to his roots in Victoria where his wife is based and says he’s not deciding on his next career move until February. Having spent much of the past decade commuting to Shanghai, where the suits are manufactured, he says that he’s looking forward to being in one place for a while. “It was the first time I’ve made a call for personal over business,” Vucko says. “It was a very conscious decision, and it was one that was well supported, so it wasn’t like I was pushed out.”

As for returning to his hometown, he says, “It was the last place I wanted to be, but now I’m super excited to be coming home. It’s funny how that priority just shifts.”