Learning to tap into your natural creativity, like Doug Gaudet did with his optical art gallery, is a good way to boost any business venture.

by Kathleen Martin

The day I met Doug Gaudet, he was wearing a sharp tailored suit, complete with a striped shirt and shiny green polka-dot tie. He was also sporting a pair of pointed shoes, bold socks, and glasses with a thick, blue, handmade frame accented by a green hue. The fantastic blend of colours, textures, and patterns—which I couldn’t have put together in a lifetime’s worth of shopping—were spot on, but not necessarily what I would have expected from an optician. But the look was 100% Gaudet.

Gaudet and his wife, Debra, have owned and operated Gaudet Optical Ltd. in Halifax for the last 22 years. Once you’ve visited, it will make other optical shops pale in comparison. Gaudet Optical is a riot of bright colours, both on the walls, which are painted orange, purple, yellow, and green, and in the original artwork that hangs on them and on shelves.

“Eyeglasses are art for your face,” insists Gaudet. Most of the pieces he sells are created by artists and engineers at small European frame houses. None of it is understated. His clientele agrees with his philosophy: that eyewear is a statement, and that people always notice someone’s glasses. The funky Taeo, Bugatti, and Paris Frost designer styles he carries, however, aren’t for everyone. “Sometimes people walk in the door, look around, and leave,” he says. “They know right away they’re in the wrong place, and that’s fine.”

Gaudet’s confidence in the direction he chose for his business, which he says provides a “comfy little bit of the market” (although he doesn’t track market share), is the hallmark of an entrepreneur who has effectively harnessed his creativity, according to experts Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers. Twenty years ago Ray, a professor of creativity, innovation, and marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and Myers, an art therapist, wrote the classic text, Creativity and Business. In it they note, “People who are creative in business have a compelling vision or mission. They are successful because they love what they do; they seem to live directly from Essence, without static from a false personality.”

While Gaudet Optical’s decor is colourful, it doesn’t feel contrived. Gaudet says that he has never seen a store like his anywhere else. “There’s nothing that I would pattern myself after,” he says. “My vision just comes out of my head. And it helps that I have artistic people working with me.”

The prospect of harnessing creativity can be daunting. It’s well enough for those who can hardly contain it, but what about for “regular” folks—those who would swear they don’t have a creative bone in their body? Can you become creative? According to Creativity and Business, most people in business already are: “[Business] is an extremely creative form, and can be more creative than all the things we classically think of as creative. In business, the tools with which you’re working are dynamic: capital and people and markets and ideas. [These tools] all have lives of their own. So to take those things and to work with them and reorganize them in new and different ways turns out to be a very creative process. [Businesspeople] might not verbalize in terms of art, but they express in myriad ways the same approach that artists do.”

In those terms, the fact that Doug Gaudet’s creativity happens to express itself artistically is beside the point. What matters is that he approached a business challenge—how to market and sell fashionable eyewear—from a fresh perspective, and that his approach allowed him to express his true self. We may not all create on as broad a scale as he does, but we all create.

Ray gives a test to his students, most of whom, he says, would score themselves as having below-average creativity. Then he asks them to recall a time when they had a great idea—one that solved a problem that was important to them, regardless of how trivial others might consider the problem. Then recall another great idea that solved a problem. And another. Those are examples of bona fide creativity, proving that they do know how to be creative after all.

The trick is learning to tap into your creativity naturally and consistently when you’re approaching business problems. “Creativity,” state Ray and Myers in their book, “is inhibited by fear, negative personal judgement, and the chattering of your mind.” You need to be brave and willing to say something out loud with confidence, regardless of what others might think.

I wear glasses, and the next time I need new frames, I’m going to visit Doug Gaudet. I’m not sure if any of his “eye art” will suit me; my current pair has plain black frames and is pretty conservative. Regardless, I’m glad that Gaudet Optical, in all of its exuberance, exists. Because even if I leave after taking a quick look around, something important always stirs when you experience another person’s creativity laid bare:your own.

Kathleen Martin is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She can be reached at masthead@ns.sympatico.ca.