Venroy founder and MD Sean Venturi discusses why the brand won't go back into wholesale.
The history of the brand is that we started as a specifically board short brand, at the end of 2010, start of 2011.
And I actually lived in America for four years from 2011 until the end of 2014, and we had an almost exclusively wholesale business.
We had a really healthy Barneys business, we sold in Nordstrom and David Jones in Australia, and at the end of 2014, start of 2015 I moved back to Sydney.
I guess I was kind of worn out with the whole wholesale model; we used to do four trade shows a year and we'd be flying all over America and then coming back to Sydney and doing showings.
Then we'd find out that there would be mark down rebates and we'd be on sale there and we'd be hearing from other people complaining that we were on sale there - so we were just constantly putting out fires.
And the other thing was that we really didn't have a lot of ability to focus on the actual customer.
Our business was really determined by what the buyers wanted from us and the direction that the buyers wanted us to go in, as opposed to our customers.
So we decided to relaunch the business as a direct-to-consumer brand and we opened our first store at the end of October 2015.
That's when we expanded the offering from just board shorts to a full leisurewear offering for men and we added women's in 2017.
Part of the whole strategy has been not losing focus on the customer and just understanding that we're catering to a really specific activity in people's lives - leisure - and it's something that inspires us.
Maintaining that focus, and continuing to develop purposeful product for that aspect of people's lives was what was driving us from a design perspective as well as a business strategy perspective.
I feel that wholesale - although I do understand it's really healthy for some businesses - it's just something that I think would distract us from our focus.
So it's definitely not something that we want to be doing.