TRANSCRIPT
My name is Jane and I’m officially the Big Bird, [that] is my title, of Birdsnest.com.au which is a retail clothing business based in Cooma. We are about women, we are about women’s clothing. Our motto is “for everything but the girl“ and literally that is what we aim to do. We can dress her from head to toe.
I guess when I went and fell in love with a farmer and ended up in regional Australia it was a natural transition to say OK we have got this great retail store; how do we take that online and look at the opportunities that are online at the moment and it was just an open space so why can’t we do it. Google doesn’t care where you are. It doesn’t care if you are in regional Australia or the big city. If you are the most relevant person or the most relevant site, they will find you.
I think a lot of people think that you can just pop up a website and it will kind of run itself because it doesn’t seem like the same commitment as going out and putting in a physical store but I really see it as the same kind of commitment as actually renting a store, putting the stock in, servicing it, because, in the end, you need someone who can answer that phone and answer any calls. The love that has to go into every product that goes up on the site, the photography, the investment in marketing, you really have to understand who you want to be online and then resource that because otherwise you will get lost, it’s a big market.
I guess we had a real dream about who we wanted to be. The store itself has been so critical to going online because, for one, it’s taught us so much about retail and, for two, we could never have gone out and invested in that stock initially knowing we only had the online channel to clear it. We really had a successful store, we knew that if the online thing flopped we had another way of moving the stock because we really didn’t know what to expect, yes we had big dreams. So in terms of integrating as it went on, at the very beginning all the stock was picked from the store so when an order came in we would literally walk out onto the shop floor and pick the stock and then pack it and it would go.
The thing that I’m proudest of is the team. The fact that we are in a regional community and we have got this fantastic team that is passionate about what they do. We have been able to grow that team from five people to now over 40 people. The lady in accounts, sometimes she rings me on a Monday and says “Jane did you know that we actually paid 40 people this week?” and I’m like “Wow!”
Some of the things that as a team we are really proud of is that, coming from little Cooma, we are in the top 50 most visited apparel sites in Australia, so we can’t believe it. We are sitting next to big guys, big names in the retail industry. We were recently nominated by BRW as one of the most outstanding retailers of the year. Hopefully it’s making other businesses see that you can run a very successful online retail business outside major metropolitan areas. You get to live in the slow lane and work in the fast lane, it’s great.