Dynamic Export

Delivering the brand

So lean, in fact, that they do almost everything in-house, from product design to photography and advertising production, all self-taught. “If you have enough drive, enough passion and you don’t have any money you can teach yourself anything,” says Holland.

This model satisfies both the creative drive of Ashby, who can move his imagination into reality, and the more practical Holland, whose focus is on efficiency. “I tell the staff here that not one business process in this company is sacred,” he says. “If they can find a better way to do something, we should do it.”

This is evident at their headquarters: from the shifting drawers of product in the stock room that changes according to a garment’s popularity to increase accessibility for staff to fill an order, to their freight handling, where they’ve integrated systems with Fedex for faster documentation.

Being efficient also allows them to be flexible and take advantage of opportunities, as they did with their international advertising campaign, now taking advantage of the northern summer.

“We wanted to advertise on bus shelters in Milan. People told us it couldn’t be done, that it would cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, there are always opportunities. We said to the agent ‘we’ll take off-peak, or let us know if there’s a cancellation, we can roll out our campaign in 24 hours’,” explains Holland. “Those people who tell us it can’t be done then come to us and say ‘how did you do it?’”

Another impressive aspect of the aussieBum business model is their relatively risk-free sales model. There’s no sales team because they make 85 percent of sales direct to the customer through their website, and customers pay before the goods are shipped.

Brand loyalty is also a key success factor. “We have hundreds of thousands of customers on our email database and we’ll email them every few weeks to advise them of new products. If we want to lift our sales we can change our volume from 50 to100 percent more in the space of a day,” adds Holland.

With an expected turnover for the 2008/09 financial year to hit $22 million from a small team of approximately 30 staff, a customer base spanning 120 countries, and a website that will soon hit 13 languages, aussieBum is an admirable exporter and a truly global business.

“We consider ourselves an international brand which just happens to have Australia as our backyard,” says Holland.

AussieBum’s foundation for success:

• Grow with your assets. “We only ever used tools that were available to us at the time and we never spent money we didn’t have,” says Holland. “We’re completely debt-free, we borrowed nothing.”
• Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. AussieBum are renowned for being the exception, which Holland says is due to the fact that they didn’t know how it was done: “Because we’ve never grown up with retail we don’t confine ourselves to that model or thought process.”
• Find opportunities. When the brand wanted to advertise in Men’s Health but found it too expensive, they ended up sponsoring the inaugural Men’s Health Ocean Race series, which directly exposed them to potential customers. “Always ask, ‘is there anything else?’” suggests Holland.
• Be agile. “We can bring out a product in a week. We can come up with an idea on a Monday and have it in production and sell quantities on the following Monday,” says Holland.

Check out the aussieBum website, containing examples of their in-house video production and photography.

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