How I moved my retail business online

Lisa Allen opened her first fashion store 18 years ago, but Freez Clothing, which she founded with business partner Mick Michaels, has quickly become an Australian independent retail success story. The firm turns over $3.5 million and sells from a variety of brands, including Allen’s own.

One of the company’s keys to success is a shift to online retail, which occurred over several months from 2006. Allen says while opening a multi-channel business is tough, it’s also critical that more businesses start doing the same.

How has the business performed over the last year?

I think we’ve faced a lot of challenges. Retail in general is quite tough at the moment. But in the past year some of the brands that we were carrying went online themselves, so that affected our business. We’ve actually restructured the entire business, rather than putting our eggs into one basket and concentrating on a few, we’ve branched out and expanded the number of brands we sell. We’ve also expanded our own brand, and we’re about to do a site redesign too.

I went to the online retail conference in America recently, and that was a great experience, I learnt a lot. It’s a challenging year ahead, so we just have to look at how to make that next step in the business.

Last year you were turning over $3.5 million. Has that changed?

We’ve had basically no growth, it’s flat. Considering the industry I think we’re doing okay.

When did you open your first retail store?

I opened my first store 18 years ago. It’s always interested me, moving into the online space. Probably around 2006, I really started taking an interest in online retailing.

I noticed that many of the brands we carried, there appeared to be not much interest selling online. So we thought about putting our actual store on the internet, and that got the ball rolling.

It took months of resourcing and research, along with photographs and so on, to get the store on board. We really had to go back to the drawing board.

What made you want to go online?

At the time there wasn’t all this talk about online retailing. For me, it was more of a challenge. I was bored with where the stores were and I thought we could do something different.

People were starting to talk about how you should have a website, but not selling online. I think I was looking at some other retail stores and thought we have much better product than them, so it was more about getting online as fast as we could.

What was the biggest change you needed to prepare for?

It’s all about the product. I actually approached all the suppliers to get permission to sell online. As it turns out we were lucky and got in first with a few of the brands –some of them weren’t online at all.

Were the suppliers a bit taken aback?

Some of them are a bit precious, in general and online too. I didn’t get any “no” answers, but some wanted to just restrict their online sales to two or three retailers only. One of the brands didn’t want to be on the same website as another brand, and so on. We actually opened a secondary website as a result of that.

Was it a frustrating experience?

It wasn’t frustrating, but it was time consuming. The frustrating thing is when they aren’t online themselves. But it’s the way of the future, so in one sense I don’t understand why they aren’t doing it. That’s their choice, but I think they’re going to damage their business down the track.

It’s only going to continue to grow from here. So we had to talk about how we couldn’t rely on just some brands, so we poured a lot of money into our product, and it forced us to reassess the business.

What are some other challenges of moving to a multi-channel model?

I think just selecting the product that you put online. It took a long time to determine what sort of product we were going to sell. And what we thought was going to sell well didn’t, and that was frustrating. I’d wonder why they weren’t selling.

The delivery process takes a long time to get right as well, and Australia Post is just so frustrating that it isn’t funny. They lose parcels and just don’t care, so it took a while to get on top of that.

The overnight shopper also expects overnight delivery, so getting that in place and getting it right can get frustrating.

What do you think you’ve learnt the most out of the whole experience?

Probably more around technology and online marketing. It’s just completely different, everything like Google Analytics, AdWords, that sort of thing. It’s completely different to bricks and mortar, but just as important.

It’s been a whole learning curve. I think it’s important that particularly with the market exploding, it’s just so important to keep going back to workshops and conferences to learn. The industry is changing so much, all the time.