We stand out in the market by being distinctly Australian. It’s Australian provenance, which shines through in the brand imagery as well as in the products themselves, was specifically designed to take advantage of the extremely positive view of Australia in the global marketplace.
With the intimate bush plant knowledge held by indigenous Australians, and active botanicals and natural ingredients, Uandi Natural products provide a pure and natural skincare experience.
This is a tricky question because we don’t actually have any staff – not even me.
Our business model is built around contracting the services that we need. This includes everything from graphic design to manufacturing and, in my case, company management.
I guess if we reduce this down to people with Uandi Natural business cards, we are looking at five people.
We have been working very hard to secure a listing with a large retailer in the UK over the last six months, which we are hopeful of securing in the near future.
Given this, we are projecting revenue of $300,000 for this financial year.
We have had to overcome a number of challenges. The greatest was probably getting the correct setup for the management of the company.
This was a huge challenge because it involved the resignation of one of the founders who held the position of managing director and then a redefinition of everybody’s role within the company in order to get the company performing.
It was very challenging to go through a process such as this whilst also trying to keep our close personal friendship intact.
It should be said, however, that although this particular founder is no longer the managing director, he is still an important part of the team and provides a valuable skill set.
At the moment, the biggest risk we face is the failure to expand our distribution beyond what currently exists.
Cashflow is absolutely essential to us at the moment and the failure to continuously expand our distribution to generate this cashflow will lead the business to failure.
If I were to do all this again, I would be a lot more focused on developing relationships and opening dialogues with key retailers in a number of different distribution channels.
In the early days of Uandi Natural, the focus was on purely targeting the one or two distribution channels where we had decided we wanted to place our products.
I believe that we were much too exclusive in this approach, which hurt us in terms of initial growth.
My advice would be to find business mentors that are interested in you both personally and also in what you are trying to achieve.
By building a support network of people that you can turn to for advice – be it advice about a particular situation or to gain a better understanding of the challenges that lie ahead – their expertise is invaluable.
In my case, I have five people with vast experience in a number of different areas such as management and finance that I am able to turn to for advice.
I seem to encounter new challenges on an almost daily basis.
