“People Don’t Talk To Each Other Anymore, They Just Tag Each Other”

Tell me a little bit about the Daily Edited?

So the Daily Edited now is in its third iteration. It launched as a lifestyle blog in 2011 by myself and my co-founder Tanya. We were both lawyers at the time and we just wanted to create a platform where we could share our ideas and kind of do something nice outside of work. Then we launched a clothing line under the brand Edited, but then running the apparel business was difficult because we were still working.
Then in August 2014 we launched a small range of leather accessories under the brand TDE and we really haven’t looked back since. The business has just grown so much since then, we’ve both now quit our jobs as lawyers. Crazy!

Do you have any stats on your growth?

In terms of revenue probably we grew from $50,000 in December 2014 up to $1 million last December. So if you multiply out that growth it’s some crazy number.

How did you deal with that?

I still don’t deal with that well! I’m constantly struggling. I think a lot of people don’t admit that! Obviously I do the best job that i can but there are a million balls in the air and I feel like I’ve got twenty million things to do all the time. The first thing was to build the team and now it’s managing that team because I can’t watch what 20 people are doing daily. Now we’re introducing a bricks and mortar element to our business at David Jones.

How did you get that David Jones deal?

I look at every order every night and I noticed that a lot of people from David Jones were actually buying and they were working in the merchandising. And  these people have access to whatever they want, but they’re still buying our products so I sent a whole suite of products in there and they had heard of our brand and liked it. it was all kind of a natural pitch in sort of the same way we’d pitch to anyone else really.

How do you handle competition? Monogrammed accessories seem to be everywhere.

Yeah definitely. I guess it comes down to the base product. Customisation itself is a trend – it might all be over in two years or six months. This Christmas, will people want to be giving monogrammed things to their loved ones, who knows? Our base product is good quality and it works without the monogramming. That’s what sets us apart from our competitors. Our travel line does really well because no one else is kind of doing that stuff. Same with like our laptop cases – cool ones don’t really exist anywhere else.

Where do you source and manufacture everything?

Everything is made in China so we source all of our leather across China and we buy all of our own inputs and our own hardware and we dye our leather in the colour that we want for a certain season. We work with several partners in the space and Tanya basically lives in China now. The volume of stuff we need to get out of there every week means that we need to have someone on the ground.

Is word of mouth your biggest marketing tool?

I think we’ve grown massively organically and I think organically today means social media right? People don’t talk to each other anymore they just tag each other. Obviously we’ve had some marketing campaigns and we have PR but we haven’t actually had the band width to pay for a lot of marketing. I think at the end of the day I haven’t had a lot of pressure running this business, it’s not like we have an external investor that I have to report to, it’s literally just a hobby gone massive. We just try to enjoy what we’ve got and take it to the next level.

What’s your best advice to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

Just do it. Barriers to entry to establish a business in Australia are basically non-existent. You register your business name with three clicks, you license a domain name – again very quick – make an Instagram account and there you go.If you’ve got $100 you can do it. Worst- case scenario, you just learn from it.

Alyce will be speaking at the Online Retailer Conference in Melbourne from March 16-17.

Every day, KBB’s Dannie Doughan chats with an entrepreneur and features their story on our website. If your business wants a ‘Date with Dannie’, email us a quick bit about your biz!

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