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Bob Young was glad he wasn’t in Canada on Thursday.

“I’m in North Carolina, and from what I gather today is a better day to be in North Carolina (weather-wise),” laughed the Hamilton, Ont.-born chief executive of Lulu.com and the founder of Red Hat Software Inc.

Lulu.com announced Thursday its official entry into the Canadian market, offering a localized version of its portal that sells self-published books, videos or other products. Lulu releases 2,500 new titles a week by unknown authors from around the globe. Authors charge as much as they want for their work and receive 80 per cent of that price, while Lulu takes the other 20 per cent. By offering thousands of items in small runs, Lulu has taken in US$16 million this year. 

Young spoke with ITBusiness.ca about how he’s grown Lulu since it was launched three years ago. 

ITBusiness.ca: What does Lulu’s Canadian presence consist of?

Bob Young: It actually represents two different things, though tightly related. All U.S. Web sites tend to be U.S.-centric by definition -- the U.S. is the world’s biggest market and you tend to focus on U.S. sales tax issues and language and everything else. And yet people in countries other than the United States – we’re willing to tolerate U.S.-based stories or catalogues, but we don’t like it. The French refuse to buy from U.S. Web sites. The Canadians hold their nose and continue to buy things. So when we talk about launching Lulu in Canada we’re talking about a Lulu Canada-branded Web site where we spell colour with a “u” and we understand how GST works and charge it or don’t charge it as the situation requires. And we meet our delivery standards. Up until now we’ve run our site and actually sell quite a lot into Canada, but we do so by making our Canadian customers suffer a little bit because it takes a couple of extra days to getting it across the border and all the rest of it. What we’re talking about it making our Canadian service the absolute equivalent of our U.S. service by having a Canadian-focused sales team and Canadian offering. 

ITB: So do you form partnerships with outside firms to handle that logistics work?

BY: Yes, we do a lot of that. We’re very much a 21st century company in that we try to have as virtual a company as we can. One of the launch elements we’re talking about is we actually have offices in Hamilton where we employ engineers and have marketing executives targeted at the Canadian market, but also with a sort of a world mandate, as a lot of Canadian offices have. 

ITB: But you’ve had that presence in Hamilton for a while, right?

BY: Yes and no. It was sort of run as a division of the Tiger-Cats, this MRX marketing organization. But we’re actually repositioning that substantially and moving MRX away from the Ti-Cats and into Lulu, but what we realized was that our Internet skills that we had been building in MRX applied much more to the Lulu market place on a global basis than it applied to the Ti-Cats just in Canada. So, for example, we have a Web site building team in Canada. We started off building Web sites for football teams and then for hockey teams. The more we looked at this, we realized we should be building Web sites for publishers so they could be using Lulu more effectively. There’s a lot more leverage to that.

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