Keeping the local post office in business: The thriving e-commerce shoe retailer being run from a NSW farm
Millwoods founder Jane Robertson shares her journey of starting an online shoe business from her family farm in NSW.
When Jane Robertson shares the story of how she came to found luxury footwear brand Millwoods from her family’s farm in regional New South Wales, she recalls two defining moments where she had to take a leap of faith.
Two moments where she needed to decide if becoming a business owner was the right path for her, and in her words, “give it a crack”.
The first of these sliding door moments was in late 2017 when Robertson was looking for something she could work on from home when she and her husband, an airplane pilot, were starting a family.
Flexibility was important – she had grown up watching her father run his own business – and living in a rural area meant limited job opportunities.
While searching online for a pair of shoes to buy – at a time when the Aussie dollar was at parity with the US one – thoughts of running her own shoe business started forming in Robertson’s mind. A self-confessed shoe aficionado, the idea seemed to fit as well as her favourite pair of crocodile skin stilettos (which she splurged her first full pay cheque on at the age of 23).
Before long, Robertson was traveling to Tamworth to meet with a business owner who was selling her shoe business and asking her father’s long-time accountant to run his eyes over the books. The business wasn’t really going anywhere, he advised, and suggested Robertson should “have a crack” on her own, with her own brand.
Hours of Alibaba research later, plus a favour from a Sydney-based cousin and a “random email” to someone called Katie, and Robertson had 2,500 pairs of children’s leather shoes on the way to her farm.
“I’d gone too far,” she recalls. “I couldn’t press stop”.
Millwoods, named after the road on which her family farm sits, was up and running, but it was a hard slog. Customers loved the shoes, Robertson says, but at the time, the higher price point didn’t match the market norm. Plus, when a parent buys a pair of quality shoes that last for their child, and which they can pass down to younger siblings, they don’t come back to buy again.
The shoes, quite simply, “didn’t sell”. But what Robertson did uncover was a demand for high quality, stylish and comfortable shoes from the mums she had been targeting, who were shopping for themselves.
Faced with her second moment of truth, Robertson had to either “shut down the business or give the women’s range a crack”.
So that’s exactly what she did. Robertson placed a small order for 200 pairs of what is now one of Millwoods’ top sellers, the leopard-print loather, and sold them all while at the Buy From the Bush market in Sydney’s Martin Place at the end of 2019, at the height of the drought.
Acting on her feet, she asked her husband to fly home to pick up a prototype for a new navy shoe, to bring it to Sydney’s CBD. She sold another 40 pairs from that prototype and it seemed her gamble was paying off.
Building a community
Today, the Millwoods shoe range includes different 27 styles, which are stocked by 35 boutiques across Australia and sold online to a loyal customer base.
The self-funded business turns over half a million dollars in revenue each year and Robertson speaks proudly of the brand’s reputation for producing shoes that combine style and comfort.
Source: supplied
Robertson designs all of the products herself from her home near the Riverina town of Coolamon, which is located 40 kilometres north-west of Wagga Wagga and home to around 2500 residents.
The shoes are manufactured offshore – the business is now using manufacturers in both China and Spain – and Robertson is frank about the reason for this.
“You can’t manufacture shoes in Australia,” she says.
“The shoes would have to be $400 plus … it’s not at all feasible.”
However, Robertson describes the manufacturing process as a relatively small part of the Millwoods operations, which has created real jobs in the Coolamon community too.
The business supports Robertson’s family, and she has recently hired her first employee. But equally important is the work it has created for the local, privately-owned post office, the owner of which has been able to step back from that business and hire another two people to run it instead.
Together with another recently opened business, four new jobs have been created in the small town, and these are not jobs that are dependent on the cyclical nature of the agriculture industry.
“I think that’s the important side of building community,” she says.
When Robertson dreams big, she thinks about building her own picking and packing facility in Coolamon, which could support Millwods and other businesses like hers, sending packages out to Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra daily.
But for that to work, governments would have to come to the party and get serious about improving the rail infrastructure in regional areas, she says.
“We rely so much on trucking, but there’s no reason why my shoes can’t go into a container and go down via the train, and get trucks off the roads.”
There is so much potential to build the regions so that “money stays in the area”, says Robertson, who is passionate about the need to create meaningful employment opportunities in places like Coolamon, which she says is “not a wealthy town”.
“Governments need to look at diversifying operations in regional areas,” she says.
“Agriculture is massive in Australia, but the government needs to consider the skill set that is out here and what else we can do.”
The power of email marketing
For Robertson, one of the key skills she has developed since founding Millwoods is digital marketing.
Coming from a background of working in primary health, the world of social media and email marketing was new terrain for the founder, who initially swatted up on what she needed to know by using Klaviyo to send the brand’s emails.
These days she has someone helping her manage Millwoods email marketing, and it’s easy to see why: email marketing accounts for 63% of the brand’s revenue.
“It’s huge. We send a lot of emails,” says Robertson.
The Millwoods email database has around 7,000 “insanely engaged” subscribers and the brand sends three-to-four emails a week. But not everyone receives every email.
“I am very specific about who our customer is,” she explains.
“We’ve worked really hard with the content that we deliver to them and how that’s delivered … We section it out and do a lot of analysis in terms of who opened an email, what do they click through to.”
Some emails will be tailored to a customer’s shoe size, explains Robertson, or based on the amount of time since they last made a purchase.
“By being able to really strategise and manipulate this marketing approach to offer bespoke value to our customers, I think is what gives us that 63%,” she says,
“It is the one budget line that I never even assess. It is: what do we need to spend to keep it going?”
“Hold on to your hat”
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, says Robertson when asked for her advice to other business owners.
“Hold on to your hat,” she says.
“It’s going to be the loneliest, hardest ride you’ve ever done in your life. But the days when you have good days make it worth it. For some reason, you just keep going forward.”
Most business owners start out on their own, says Robertson, and that takes a lot of internal strength.
“Looking after yourself mentally while you’re doing it is really important,” she says.
