![]() Never miss a story: sign up to SmartCompany’s free daily newsletter and find our best stories on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Shipping internationally can be a bit daunting with the different duties and freight options, so if you’re not sure, just ask a question. ![]() I’m not sure if it’s the proximity, but the Asian market works. We do have a couple of international stockists and we ship internationally ourselves. One’s in the construction space and another is in the health and wellness space, so this gives us different facets to look at other aspects of our business. ![]() We do have mentors now, which has happened organically through people we’ve connected with who have believed in our product. Plenty of people gave us this advice when we started, but we didn’t listen. We’d spend all this money on a product before we’d tested it in the market, which you should never do. We made so many mistakes early, usually around buying too many products or going deep on something before having a minimum viable product. You’ll get feedback and you’ll refine your processes and your product. The minute you have an inkling of an idea, get out there on social media and spread the word. It’s all about being authentic, and numbers aren’t what matter. Social media is a big slice of our marketing, but I think it takes a while to know what works and resonates with your audience. ![]() Once you find a good person, you don’t want to let them go. They depend on you to get paid at the end of the month.īut once we hired them, we realised how much we needed them. Hiring someone is nerve wracking because for the first time you’re responsible for someone’s livelihood. That’s great because you get a lot of extra knowledge you wouldn’t get otherwise. We have a lot of people who work for us just two days a week - consultants who work for other brands too. We have three girls who work full-time and a bunch of part-timers. Launching this week ? #staytuned #abstractbamboo #newin ? post shared by Nimble Activewear on at 1:21am PDT Online is still a huge platform for us, but store space is so important to bring our brand beyond the screen.Īs Melbourne girls, a Melbourne store has always been on the cards, and now the Bondi store is really stable, we have the opportunity to think about launching a second one. We put so much effort into our fabrics and fit so we wanted a physical presence where customers could touch and feel the product. We started online but we moved into a retail location in Bondi Beach in February 2016. We’ve both come from families where our fathers have their own business, but I never grew up thinking I’d be running my own business. It was only when we did that did it really feel like a business. I only quit my job a year ago we even made our first hire before I left my job. It felt just like a side hobby initially, and we both juggled part-time work. It was a six-month process to build our website, source our fabrics, and manufacture our products. But people were expressing themselves more, and more and more women were happy to wear activewear outside of just exercise. Something consumers would really value.īack then it was very Lululemon heavy - a lot of block colours that were all one and the same. We started to go to the gym together, and we realised there was a gap in the market for beautiful but functional activewear. Katia had to return to Australia while she was waiting for her European passport to come through, so she came up to Sydney to stay with me. We really went at it, and pursued our careers quite aggressively. I went to Sydney and Katia went to London where she worked for Burberry. As we grew up our careers took us to different places. Katia and I have known each other since we were 14 - we both went to school in Melbourne together. Yan spoke to SmartCompany about the explosion in the athleisure market, and how listening to a bit of early advice could have saved the two founders some trouble. The first Nimble bricks-and-mortar store opened in February last year in Bondi Beach, and the team is currently staking out locations for a Melbourne store. Four years on, the business now pulls in more than $3 million in revenue annually. Friends from the age 14, Katia Santilli and Vera Yan’s careers in finance and merchandising took them all across the world before the two found themselves together again in Sydney, going to the gym and formulating the plan for an activewear brand that would be both fashionable and functional.Īfter six months of planning, Nimble Activewear was launched in 2013, with Santilli and Yan running the business as a “side hobby” while still working part-time.
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