BC Business
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The fragrance of bath bombs hits you the moment you step onto the pavement outside Lush North America’s Southeast Marine Drive distribution centre. Upstairs in the wood-floored, open-design offices, 43-year-old Mark Wolverton looks remarkably well rested, given his recent schedule, which included a night stranded in the Toronto airport.
Wolverton laughs at his career path, describing his detour into bath products as “building a business that you’re completely unfamiliar with in an industry that you have no experience in.” A descendant of the founder of Wolverton Securities Ltd., Wolverton spent his high-school summers on the trading floor of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, fully expecting to step into a long career at the venerable brokerage firm. Today, he and his brother manage a real-estate portfolio that includes a number of downtown office buildings and West End residential buildings. More recently, he bought a brewery in Kamloops and partnered with Vancouver restaurateur Mark James to open brew pubs in Whistler, Yaletown, Surrey and North Vancouver. But those are just part-time gigs. Wolverton left the brokerage business in 1998, and today his day job is selling bath and body-care products. As president and CEO of Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, the North American operation of the worldwide chain, he oversees everything from manufacturing to store design at Lush’s 60 outlets in Canada and the U.S. Wolverton first stumbled upon Lush products in 1995, when he and his wife Karen Delaney-Wolverton were visiting London, England. A meeting with the financial backers of a successful bath-products shop led to an agreement to bring Lush to North America. Wolverton’s original idea was to take the company public and hire management staff to look after operations. But along the way, he got hooked on the business. Initially, he and a partner set up a manufacturing plant in Vancouver’s Southlands and leased a location on Denman Street. The store opened in April 1996, staffed by Karen and Wolverton’s partner’s wife. It sold $280,000 in bath bombs, body lotions, soaps and powders in its first month. Today, Wolverton sits as director on the board of Lush Ltd., the U.K.-based parent company that oversees Lush’s operations in 37 countries. Wolverton hopes to open 32 new North American stores by the end of 2007 and to bring the total to 250 within five years. Even at this frantic pace, Wolverton finds time for his other passion: beer. In partnership with Mark James, he has opened a number of brew pubs around the province, including the Avalon Brewing Co. in North Vancouver, where he and his partners built the building and installed the business. And he has big plans for his Kamloops brewery, which owns the rights to the name Whistler for beer. He expects that a tasting room at the 2010 Olympics will be a springboard for expansion to the U.S. and Asia.