Dare Jennings

Do you have plans for further expansion internationally?

At the moment I just want to consolidate what we’ve done. We’ll look to the model of using distributors in other countries.

How many people are involved in Deus Ex Machina?

The principal partners are Carby Tuckwell who works here full-time and is a partner and is a creative artistic director of the company. Rod Hunwick is a guy who I’ve known for a long time who had a more traditional style of motorcycle stores and comes out of that motorcycle, motor industry. There’s also a guy called Barry Davies who is a merchant banker who helps in a financial way.

And how do you all work together?

Everyone can’t be the creative director or the artistic director. Rod has a broader sense of the motor world, and motorcycling. Barry looks after things financial.

We touched on marketing earlier. What’s the most valuable piece of marketing you’ve done here?

Happily there’s a smorgasbord of valuable things that we’ve done.  Opening in Venice Beach was fantastic because we got an enormous amount of attention for that. The thing in Bali – Bali does amazing things because the guys up there are continually doing crazy stuff with motorcycles and surfing that gets worldwide attention. Every time we build a motorbike we post it on the internet and people all over the world talk about it and look at it so all of that works pretty well.

So do you sell on the internet as well?

Yes, we do. Like everyone we have our own e-shop. I’ll have to say that the whole world of people running their own e-shops is sort of coming to an end in a way. It’s such a fine art, e-tailing and that, it’s much better to hook up with someone who’s really good at it and try to do it as a part-time thing yourself.

So how do you work that into your business as a whole?

In the end, e-tail has just become another wholesale account. So you find people who can project your goods in a way that you want it.

The Deus Ex Machina stores all include cafes or restaurants, how do you build that retail experience and what’s important about that experience?

The idea is that space is the new luxury, and we are probably one of the worst retail addresses in Sydney on Parramatta Road.  But because we’re able to afford to be able to take a larger building, we can make that larger building interesting and worth the effort for people to get here. It works quite well. The closer we get to a high street, the smaller it’s going to be, and it’d just end up being a shop like anybody else’s shop, but out here we’re at the stage where we can entertain people, and that goes for Bali and for Venice Beach as well.

What do you think your staff would say would be your flaw as the leader?

My incredibly short attention span.

And why is that?

I’m just a child, that’s all. I’m just a child, stumbling along. That’s just who I am. We’re all one trick ponies, we come and go on all the things that we do. With businesses, I’ve always had to find them entertaining otherwise I get bored very quickly. My attention to detail could probably be better.

So you sold out of Mambo in 2000, that’s quite a question for entrepreneurs, when to leave. How did you know it was time to go?

Well, there was a time where I thought I would never see it, it was such a personal business that I thought I would never sell it. But one day someone said, “One day we’ll buy it for this much,” and within that split second I could do nothing else but sell it.

A friend of mine once said that if you ever want to screw up your competitors, go and make them a great offer for their business, then go into a contract negotiation and pull out after a while and it’ll ruin their concentration very badly. Once the offer is made and you realise that – the hard part is concentrating through the negotiation, once you decide to go, it’s time to go.

In hindsight with what’s happening in the surf industry, it looks like it was very good timing. What’s your view on the future of surfwear? Billabong is really struggling at the moment.

I would like to think that what we’re doing is what the surf industry will become. We’re much broader, there’s much more enthusiasm. To be honest, that’s what I figured, that’s what I wanted to do with Deus Ex Machina, to create an alternative to what the industry had become.

And I think there’s fresh ideas coming and new things coming and it just has to break away from that big corporate mentality. In the end, that’s why I sold Mambo, because it had become far more about management rather than ideas or creativity. So for someone like me, that’s the time to go – when it had become boring.

How big will Deus Ex Machina have to be before you have to sell out of that?

Oh God only knows. I’m not thinking about that at this point. It’s like holding onto a tiger’s tail. It has great relevance, great potential, but it’s just holding onto it that’s the problem.

So what do you think a company like Billabong needs to do?

I have no idea. They’re a public company and they’re completely different. What a public company should be I have no idea, because the mentality and the thinking is completely different. It would be good if there was a bit more spirit in what they do, but that’s very hard for a committee to come up with that. And that’s the trouble, all those companies were started by entrepreneurs, wild and crazy guys with ideas that they’ve pursued, and now they’ve all been taken over by boards of directors and that just makes it a lot harder to succeed in the sort of market that we’re in.

How do you think your background helped you become an entrepreneur?

What, driving tractors around in circles out in western New South Wales? Maybe it just made me run away as far as I could from it.

If you want a somewhat facetious line, I was brought up a farmer and farmers just have this never-ending sense of doom, and I think when you’re in business you realise you really better get your act together because the whole thing’s going to collapse and I think that’s probably what I learned from being a farmer.