Melinda Herndon, ceo of scuba.com, an international ecommerce site specializing in scuba gear sales, is back in the United States and having fun working with the Dive Instructor and Development teams at scuba.com
“I’ve been in Australia for the majority of the past few years, developing two webcentric businesses: eScuba, which imports scuba gear into Australia and distributes through a retailer network of 150 dive shops & more recently, idive. idive is my pride and joy and the culmination of lessons learned living on a computer for the past 30 years. It is an end to end cloud based distribution management platform.”
Melinda Herndon states that she started these businesses in Australia, her favorite place on earth, when her daughter left for a college prep school & she found herself with a lot of free time. “There were many changes that happened suddenly & I am grateful that things came together as they did. I was very forlorn to have my daughter, my only child, leave for a boarding school. I understood her independence and we are a family of independent souls, but that did not make things any easier emotionally.” After moping around for a month, she decided to chase some dreams of her own. “With the support of my remarkable husband, I decided to jump head first into a business that would put me in a place that I love, with the most fascinating dive sites on earth.”
Melinda has been back in the USA for a month now and has enjoyed coming up to speed on general trends in b to c ecommerce. “I find it fascinating that smart phones and tablets have outpaced conventional PC’s in sales. The social media, e-commerce connection is so tight right now. There are businesses doing tens to hundreds of millions in sales from a Facebook presence alone. Social integration is the new online sales gold rush.” Towards that end, the development team at scuba.com is working hard to provide a more immersive experience for their customers.
Melinda states “It is a joy to come to work and collaborate with this brilliant team. Just about everyone at scuba.com is a diver and we have so many dive leaders…from programmers to repair techs to our warehouse team…we have several Instructors and Divemasters working here. Somebody is always just returning from or leaving for some local or exotic dive trip. The synergy is beautiful. When I am here, it is hard not to consider California as my favorite place on earth.”
For more information on scuba.com, please visit their website at www.scuba.com
