Jane Cay

That’s a high rate of repeat business. How are you keeping those customers coming back? You talked before about knowing a little bit about their buying history, does that extend to online as well?

Absolutely, so when an order comes in and even when our packers see it, we know if this is a customer’s 20^th order, is it their first order, is it their fifth order? We can look at their history and we write every person a customised note. If someone was in Queensland while the floods were on, we’d be looking up and be making sure their area’s okay and writing something like, “I hope you’re not getting wet and everyone’s safe”. We just take that little bit of extra time to understand each customer and we’re always on the phone to them, so we have a lot of customers who call us and talk through what event they’re going to, what they need. We try and provide the same service as we would in store. I think just that recognition that we remember customers and we know them has made people feel really connected to us.

Is there anything on the site where the customers themselves can see their history or lock in shopping preferences?

That’s coming in March. We have a major site redesign happening at the moment and we are working towards a lot more customised content and providing some pretty sophisticated filtering functions for customers. People love our navigation because it provides them with something different. They can shop by body shape, they can shop by personality, they can really customise the shopping experience for themselves. But the redesign is just going to take it to a new level, we’re very excited.

The judges in our Web Awards last year said your navigation was an absolute standout. How did you develop that?

It was a real eye opener for me to get onto a retail floor and serve women and I really understood the notion of what retail therapy really is for women. I saw people coming in after their second child and just not loving themselves, their body, anything about it and saw how we could really transform that experience and send her out feeling fabulous. I think it’s about just understanding the mentality of women when they shop. Our customers are less fashion driven and more about what am I going to look good in, what’s going to make my tummy look flat and my bottom look non-existent? So they just want to put something on that makes them feel good about themselves.

We also saw that many shop with certain missions in mind, ie. I am going to a cocktail function, I need something to where to go to that. So we identified what the main motivators were for women when they went shopping and then we made sure we addressed everyone. So that’s why you can shop by occasion, you can shop by colour, you can shop by body weight, etc. And that’s actually what we’ve got a fair bit of recognition for.

What have been some of the challenges when keeping up with the growth you’ve experienced?

There are so many things. We’ve got challenges like we have a different point of sale system to our website system so it’s the integration of those two systems, making sure they talk to each other. You know, a lot of things that we used to do manually we just had to find ways to do them automatically. We used to run the website out of an 80 square metre space from the back of our retail store and we’re now in a 400 square metre space, but we’re filling it out pretty quickly. It’s understanding warehousing – you know, we didn’t understand the most efficient way to pick stock to organise it in a warehouse. Our team grows weekly at the moment so just going from a team of five to a team of 35, just the HR skills you need around that and the induction and the industrial relations. It’s a minefield. We’re definitely learning very fast, our learning curve is very steep and every day there is a new challenge.

What about managing this growth? Have you been forced to put in layers of management and build that as you’ve gone along as well?

We have started to do that, but we’re just at the stage where we really need an experienced operational manager to come in. Our structure has been evolving with us.

Has that been difficult as the founder who’s been involved in everything?

Yes, it’s very hard to let go but I’m getting to a point where I’m very happy to. There’s only so much that a few key people can do and that’s why the process side is so important. Once that is in place and very clearly documented, then there’s less need for people to have their hands in every bucket.

Any challenges getting staff in a regional area that have the experience that you need?

I think being regional has been a complete advantage. I think starting any sort of online business has its challenges, probably technical challenges because people can really understand retail but they don’t understand online and there components that we didn’t understand online at all. I understood usability and creating a user centre design and that’s how we designed our site at the beginning. I didn’t understand anything about Google, so it’s only in the last six to 12 months that we’ve really focused on what Google wants to see out of our site, not just what our customers wants to see.

Was that perhaps one of the mistakes, not focusing enough on SEO earlier?

Well, I don’t regret it because I wouldn’t have wanted that to cloud how I built the site. But then there were simple things that we definitely could have taken into account. So yes, it was a learning experience, but I guess I don’t believe in regrets, just looking forward. It’s a great opportunity now.

So in terms of growing over the next 12 months, obviously the site redesign is going to be a huge focus for the business. What other efforts are there to grow the customer base?

I think the next thing we really want to do with our customers is to personalise things at another level. We can do that when we’re individually talking to them on the phone and we can do that when we’re looking at their history and we’re writing them a note. But what we want to be able to do is dynamically do that on site, so that people can tell us about their body shape, tell us what their favourite colours are and the favourite brands, and then we can dynamically provide them recommendations based on that.

Is this where you see smaller sites like yours being able to keep ahead of the bigger chains that just can’t do this sort of thing?

I guess they’ve got such big ships to move. It’s such a different business model to what they’re doing now and they’re just trying to get the bare bones up. Whether they’re thinking completely through all the motivations of their customers, I’m not sure. But I’m enjoying the period where they’re not thinking, very much.