There’s two really. One would be membership acquisition; we’re growing at 12,000 members a day. So that’s a huge growth forward. Our biggest contract for products would be something like the Witchery group, which was a great relationship that we opened up. Both parties were extremely happy with where we’ve gone on that.
Just by proving that the model works: It’s a model where we work with brands to protect their brand ownership. We don’t go out there to destroy a brand. We work with a brand as a strategic partner to liquidate their extra stock. Brand holders in Australia are now realising this, and coming to us to say, “Yes, let’s have a solution. We need a solution. You can be our solution for excess,” rather than the Direct Factory Outlet’s – let’s go with you guys. We do short, sharp sales and we liquidate stock professionally.
No, I think it’s a mix. You have the DFOs at one side and you have David Jones and Myer on another side. You know, we have great brands that all those groups have but we bring that at really good value prices. DJs and Myer offer 50% to 60% off in their July sales but we offer up to 80% to 90% off every day. We’re bringing prices to our members every day that blow them away. We listen to the consumer. What do you want? We’ll find it for you. We get it to them, they shop with us.
Around the 20% mark, which is high.
We just love to love them. We have a team in here that we’ve made look after our priority customers. And we work with them, we give them daily calls, there’s an element of people we just love to love. And we don’t let them disappear.
Customers pay $99.95 to be a priority customer. But, in hindsight, I love all our members. Everyone that joins our site is doing it because they feel comfortable with us, they know we’re out there trying to find them these brands, and one day they’ll buy from us.
So, all these customers, to us, are extremely important. There is an element of them that are in our priority bracket that we love to love and we just don’t want to lose them.
It’s all search. Search-related, online gives us our best audience, and that’s where we see our growth, we’re captivating an audience that wants great product through an online platform. We’ve researched about other marketing. Yes, it’s great, it gets your brand out there, but generally an online shopper goes onto an online store because of one reason: it’s price. They’re looking for great value; they’re not overly concerned about delivery times. They don’t want a three-hour delivery. There are sites out there offering three-hour delivery. Why? Do people really not go to work without shoes, and they need them within three hours? No. The philosophy of three-hour delivery is wrong. It’s the wrong message to get across to the consumer.
What we’re getting across to the consumer is: “Hey, you’ve remembered to wear something today, that’s great. You don’t need it in three hours. But we’re going to give you great product at 80% off and it’s going to be branded.” That’s why they love us, and that’s why they keep coming back and shopping with us.
We listen, you know. It’s really important for us to listen. We don’t mind mistakes. We encourage people to have a go. We’re a very young organisation and we’ve only got where we are today by having the management in place, and the team in place. They really do love working with us and it’s really exciting growth that we’ve seen, and the future is colossal. So we’ve got a young buying team, and they’re encouraged. Go for it! Have a go! There’s no such thing as making a mistake, because if there’s a mistake that happens in buying, we rectify it and have another go. That’s our philosophy.
I’d like to say I haven’t made a mistake, but others would say I have. I would say my biggest personal management mistake was not getting my brother across from Europe three years ago. He came two years ago. If he’d been here a year earlier, we’d be one year more advanced.
He has put in place a team that has grown this business and left my buying team to source product, great branded clothing at great prices for our members. He’s driven the acquisition; he’s driven the growth; he’s driven everything in that region.
That’s probably my only real issue with where we could have accelerated our growth through bringing him and others into the team quicker. We shouldn’t have looked out the window and said “There’s no one coming, we’ve got Australia to ourselves,” we should have just continued growing, growing, growing, which is what we are now doing.
The online environment changes rapidly, at such a fast pace. Anyone that thinks about online – you can’t think about the future with online, you’ve got to do it today. If you like it, go for it. That’s where we’ve expanded so quickly.
We have a meeting and we make it happen within 24 hours. You can’t analyse an online process. You’ve just got to go with it. The environment is going with it. The Australian audience wants online. We’re progressively giving the audience the brands that they want at value prices.
There’s always going to be a bricks and mortar shopper, point one. There’s always consumers that want to go into shops. They are not an online shopper and they will go into shopping centres.
But we are taking an awful lot of money out of the high street and putting it through our online, and, yes, we are affecting the high street retailers in the Australian and New Zealand market.
Possibly more acquisitions: We’re hungry for acquisitions, whether that be Asia or the local market. We’re looking all the time at the right acquisition. We’re looking to strategically partner brands in Europe to bring them into this marketplace. So there’s some interesting stuff and growth for us in the next 12 months.
I think the online market in this platform, in Australia and New Zealand, will double in the next 12 months. So you can see that it’s a very young business. If there’s a billion dollars currently going through the site, which there probably is in all the flash sale sites currently, and the Groupons and those models, between us we should be able to double our revenue in the next 12 months.
High street retailers open stores in their towns to open doors to get customers in. We open in countries. So our audience is vast, very quickly. A retailer can open a shop in a town of 50,000 people. We will go into a country and open up to 50 million people at the same speed.
Cara Waters is the editor of SmartCompany. Cara was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times website FT Adviser in London and has also worked for The Sunday Times.
