Ragtrader hosted its annual Melbourne conference on August 28 at the State Library of Victoria. It was a breakfast of legends, featuring the leading figureheads in Australian fashion over the last half century.
In this event round-up, we list the top lessons from each of our guest speakers.
Gabby Leibovich, Catch founder - Have 'chutzpah'
“I'm Israeli, as everyone knows, and I'm very proud of it, and we have this term called 'chutzpah'. We knock on the door, and if the door is closed, we knock on the window. I remember I once snuck into an event at the Royal Exhibition Building [Melbourne] for one of the largest aggregators of importers in the hardware space. We never sold hardware until that day.”
Jack Gance, Le Specs founder - Know your customer
“If you don't know your customer and you're not relating to your customer, what have you got? I mean, you don't want to sell things that you want to sell. You want to sell things a customer wants to buy. So get close to your customer. You can also see things in completely different industries that you can adapt to your own environment for yourself. And that's what we do all the time, curious and always eager to find and learn.”
Kellie Hush, industry legend - Pitch your worth
“Our challenge [at The Volte] is Australian venture capitals seeing the opportunity, even though we've met with lots of them. I think everyone knows the statistics: less than 1 per cent of Australian female-founded startups are invested in, even though I think globally, 63 per cent of female-founded businesses succeed. Hello! We work our asses off! We're very good at multitasking, we can do anything, nothing is too big, and we manage a family and we manage a business. There's my pitch.”
Paul Greenberg, Deals Direct founder - Problems = Opportunities
“In all the problems that we had as retailers - all of us in the room - that's ultimately the springboard to where you're going to seek opportunity. How can we solve those pain points that we all went through and are still going through? I went through a bit of a bad patch where I’d say, ‘Oh, online retail, it's profitless prosperity…’ My late grandfather was a Lithuanian merchant. He said, ‘You know, these [online] businesses are like eating chicken soup with a fork; it'll keep you busy, but you'll still be hungry.’ And that's what we went through. It was really hard, but ultimately we turned to external capital, which comes with its own challenges. And I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, a payday comes with an exit.”
Wassim Gazal, Hotsprings co-founder - Know when to pivot
“COVID was a breakthrough moment for P.E Nation. We went from zero to hero in two years. It was like everybody was wearing trackies and hoodies. That was an interesting moment for us because it really accelerated exposure. And when you start getting to that level of overexposure, your brand starts becoming a touch mainstream, and you have to be careful which way to go. Do we want to become a Lorna Jane and open 80 stores, or do we want to pull it back and keep the proposition more unique? And that was the idea behind the relaunch because we felt, Let's pull it back.”
David Briskin, Briskin Investments founder - Deals come in unexpected places
“I bumped into Howard McDonald, who was the chairman of Myer at the time, on a flight. I was living in Melbourne, and working in Sydney. And on my regular Monday morning flight up to Sydney, he was trying to convince me to put Sass & Bide into Myer. At the time, it was a David Jones exclusive brand. And I said to him, half-jokingly, but half-serious: If you want the brand, you have to buy it. And he thought about it for a second, and I realised, Oh my God, I think I've just sold the business.”
Joe Saba, SABA founder - The power of loyalty
“Consumers were really feeling it in the mid-80s. It was really tough going with 17-18% interest rates. I was sitting with two accountants, and they said to me, Joe, you're going to have to go into a vertical operation, where I would buy the fabric, design and manufacture. So that's what I went into... Backtracking to Japanese fashion, where we sold the likes of Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, that gave us a clientele, and what I believe is essential for retail, for small retail, you must have a clientele. You must have a client base to work on. You must have loyal people that follow you. And they did. They followed me from Japanese fashion to SABA.”
Stephen Bennett, Country Road founder - Find the gap and execute
“In the early 70s, the jean boom hit. It was really a result of the casualisation of the baby boomers. That was also when I saw this sportswear thing coming, and I was fascinated with it, and I decided that there was a real opportunity in sportswear. That was when decided I needed to know more about the trade, and I went and worked with a factory for a year and learned how to cut and make and what was good stitching. And that was menswear. So I decided that we should make men's shirts for women. That was the thing that kicked us off. It was really knowing that, one, there was a market trend, and two, that there was a gap - because all the jean makers were just making jeans, and we were doing skirts and shirts.”