“The whole house is my studio now,” she laughed. “The good thing is that swimwear is so tiny, it’s easy to store. Our house is small, but we can keep all of our inventory here and still live in the middle of nowhere.”
Rush lives on a 12-hectare property that they own jointly with two other couples that live out of eyeshot. Just 29, Rush is mortgage-free.
“I always tell people, it’s like a commune, but with no ideology,” she said. “We eat together once or twice a week and there is a big garden that we all share. It’s just a good neighbourly relationship.”
Bikini Empire’s designs are manufactured in Vancouver, which requires Rush to fly over anywhere from once a week in season to once a month in the off season. About half their sales come from her e-commerce site and half are wholesale orders for stores across Canada. To reduce travel, Rush relies on a private seaplane courier service to ship product samples — valuable single-copy mockups of bikini designs — to the manufacturing facility.
“At first I thought it was a crazy thing to try and I wasn’t sure we could make it fly,” she said. “When we first launched our online store and started getting orders from people all over the world, we realized that it was going to work. The first year was kind of lean, but we are living very comfortably now.”
The spread of high-speed Internet service has made it possible for many people to move their businesses, literally, into the rainforest, she said.
“Monica and I do battle dropped Skype calls from the Dominican,” she said. “That’s our biggest business challenge, just having proper communication with one another.”
Rush travels to the Dominican Republic twice a year for photo sessions and product testing. Half a dozen of Empire’s bikinis are touted to be “surf-proof” and where better than the Dominican to find out?
Bikini Empire’s online presence has been so successful that they have developed a second revenue stream re-creating that magic for other businesses.
“Since we launched we have been approached by a lot of other businesses wanting to know who did our branding, photography and social media and, well, we do it,” she said. “There are a lot of businesses that don’t really know how to do social media marketing or write their blogs so they can capture their target audience.”
When the bikini business drops off in October, Monica and Kelsey turn their energy to the branding consultancy.
“The cost of real estate in Vancouver has scared so many people off, but over here we just don’t have to worry about having a $3,000 mortgage or the implications of a bad month,” said Rush.
Fellow islanders Morri Mostow and Doug Long arrived on Gabriola from Quebec a decade ago and brought their communications and translating business with them.
“Even while we were in Montreal, we barely ever saw our clients, we generally worked from our home offices,” said Mostow. “It’s not really necessary to meet clients in person that much, so because of that it was a pretty portable business. For our purposes, communication has always been more efficient on the phone or online.”
The couple arrived with six solid clients, but both soon began to pursue passion projects while working part time for BizNet Communications, Long writing and publishing music and Mostow as an e-book publisher.
“The core business hasn’t changed for us, though there has been some attrition over the years,” said Mostow. “We lost a few clients through mergers, so I do what I have always done, just a bit less of it. We generally have two or three active clients at any given time.”
When they do pick up new clients, they are usually in Montreal, mainly through word-of-mouth or serendipitous Internet searches.
“We are (search engine optimized) as Montreal copywriters,” said Mostow.
Mostow’s side business Fictive Press has published a dozen titles mainly as e-books and print-on-demand publications, from drama and poetry to young adult fiction and children’s books. It’s a business that is easily integrated into a home office setting.
“We are not traditional publishers, so we have no inventory, no need to ship, it’s all online,” said Mostow. “I physically have no books.”
