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Melisa Vong: how one woman is dominating the e-commerce market from the Silicon Valley of Canada

Melisa Vong didn’t start her career with the plan to make e-commerce brand development her bread and butter, but found herself a natural once she tried her hand at making money online.

Melisa Vong
Photo courtesy Melisa Vong
Photo courtesy Melisa Vong

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Serial entrepreneurs who enjoy equal success across multiple enterprises are birds of a rare feather at the best of times and in any context. Skyward-bound female serial entrepreneurs are one louder, the proverbial black unicorns of the fiscal forest, even in these evolving times for women. If Melisa Vong, CEO and Managing Partner at Buzz Ventures, has stopped to admire her own magic, it is not immediately evident. She’s too busy making e-commerce moves via an always-expanding network of avenues that now includes Amazon FBA, an e-commerce incubator, a branding consultancy, real estate investments, an escape room, and a pet product line. Vong has redefined the ‘Jill of All Trades’ role and has no intention of slowing her scaling.

Melisa Vong didn’t start her career with the plan to make e-commerce brand development her bread and butter but found herself a natural once she tried her hand at making money online. Her own inspirations and interests have led organically to the niches in which she has made her name in business. Her drive to succeed in each of her selling spaces is surpassed only by her innate passion for her projects.

Vong’s foray into e-commerce was a pure necessity after moving to Toronto from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, to pursue a sales job with BMW. Thinking only that this would be an excellent opportunity to work for a well-respected company, Vong — also a Nissan sales veteran — found herself burnt out in car sales. The stress of the environment was eating away at her. 

“I didn’t realize this at the time, but looking back, the pay wasn’t very great,” she says. “My salary was $32,000, and I had to start in a product genius role first, then move into sales consultancy a couple of months into it. They did offer to pay me my base salary alone if my commissions were not higher than the base, but $32,000 is still not a lot to live on, especially in Toronto.”

Unhappy with her job, Vong knew she wanted to change her life and become her own boss. Looking first strictly to supplement her income in Canada’s most competitive and expensive city, she launched the skincare company Namskara. Two and a half years later, Vong sold that first company and repeated the whole process again in the supplement niche. She co-founded Orphic Nutrition alongside former Vancouver Whitecaps soccer player Bryce Alderson. That company was rapidly scaled and acquired shortly after by SellerX, an aggregator with a unicorn valuation that has raised more than $750 million. Vong and Alderson stayed on for two more years in a consultancy role. Vong used the proceeds from the sale of her companies to start and fund an incubator for e-commerce brands and still sells in the supplement space on Amazon.

Though Canadian by birth and still residing full-time there, Vong has always conducted most of her Amazon business on the American side of the market. She cites the ability to transcend international sell spaces as one of e-commerce’s greatest draws. She encourages aspiring sellers to realize their full earning potential by paying more attention to volume charts than geography.

“We sell in the U.S. just because it’s a bigger marketplace, about ten times larger than Canada,” she says. “Canada has much less competition but not as much volume. All of the strategies work similarly across the board. It’s just a matter of market size and then evaluating the competitiveness of the niche.”

She has now upped the ante on that niche by becoming the dominant Amazon presence in the tech-burgeoning Waterloo Corridor. Working within one of the world’s largest tech clusters that also happens to be world-renowned for business diversity puts Vong in a unique position to root and expand her own growing list of companies in an unprecedented way.

Never content to rest on her laurels, Vong founded Buzz Ventures, which started as a holding company for her own brands and quickly expanded into an e-commerce incubator for other companies she invests in or consults for.

“I started it to help our internal brands, of course, but then it took on a life of its own, and now we also service external brands. Companies come to us, tell us what they need, and we provide that for them. We help them with their listing optimization and all other aspects of their overall Amazon strategy,” she shares.

As for her own next ventures, Vong is set to open an escape room in the next five to six months in her home city of Kitchener-Waterloo. Escape games are another of her favorite things, making the fact that it is now morphing into a money stream more par for the course in Vong’s established history of pairing passion and work projects. With Zoomi Pets, a recently launched line of pet supplement products, Vong isn’t slowing down any time soon. Her calendar is busy and booked for speaking engagements and sponsorships that she is only too eager to provide.

Vong was recently invited to Wilfrid Laurier University as an alumni keynote speaker to inspire students interested in pursuing entrepreneurship and was welcomed back a month later as a judge at the Startup Laurier Venture competition, in which her company was also a platinum sponsor. The cash prizes were awarded to Laurier’s rising entrepreneurs with startups needing funding to scale their ideas and efforts.

“There have been a lot of full circle moments lately,” she smiles, “and nothing feels better than being able to give back.”

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Written By

George Nellist is a public relations, marketing and strategic brand expert who has executed social media and strategic marketing campaigns for a variety of Fortune 500 companies and small businesses. For more information, visit Ascend Agency.

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