Head lice – there are sexier markets to get into for your first business venture, but none grabbed the attention of Saea Vivian quite like those tiny vermin.
That’s because Vivian, who just opened a new lice clinic in New Westminster, is a true believer when it comes to the technology she’s bringing to the Royal City.
It all started only about a year-and-a-half ago, when the South Surrey resident was first confronted by the dreaded galloping dandruff in her nine-year-old daughter’s thick, shoulder-length hair.
“Like most parents, I was going out of my mind,” she said. “I did everything I thought I could do. … It didn’t go away.”
She had had a mother-daughter trip planned to visit her brother and sister-in-law in the U.S. and called to cancel, but her sister-in-law told them to come and promised the lice would get what was coming to them.
She then took Vivian and her daughter to a clinic equipped with a patented medical device (the AirAllé, formerly called the LouseBuster) that uses hot air to blast the creepy crawlies and their eggs.
“I was just blown away because there’s no pesticides, no insecticides. It’s completely environmentally friendly, and it worked in an hour,” Vivian said. “They told me it was going to work, and I didn’t believe them.”
It did, she said.
Along with the effectiveness of the procedure itself, Vivian was impressed with the lice clinic’s setup and approach.
“Everyone was there in scrubs; it was very much like a doctor’s office,” she said.
A 48-year-old single mom working in marketing at the time, Vivian looked into the company (Lice Clinics of American) and found out it was looking to break into Canada.
Floating the idea with friends, she was shocked to find out how many people in her circle had been affected by head lice.
“It’s not something that’s part of a dinner conversation or that you chat with friends about over a glass of wine,” she said. “They’d never said a thing to me.”
Vivian was among the first in Canada to enter into a licence agreement with Lice Clinics of America.
She opened her first Lice Clinics of Canada clinic in Langley in June.
The New West location, in the Columbia Medical Building at 301 East Columbia Street, opened this month.
Like the clinic she visited in the U.S., the New West location is set up much like a doctor’s office with individual treatment rooms.
It’s rewarding work, she said, and business is going great, but she’s still a little surprised at the direction her first entrepreneurial venture has taken her.
“This was never on my radar, never in a million years,” she said.
