[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features Jane Kay, founder and CEO of Bird's Nest. They're one of Australia's biggest fashion success stories. Leaving a job with IBM to adopt a small clothing business in regional Australia back in 2004, Jane has grown Bird's Nest to a staff of 150 people. She's serving a community of women with styled outfit inspiration. Express delivery above and beyond customer service. No hassle returns all the things that makes E commerce great. Jane, welcome to the checkout. We've heard about all the amazing things that you're doing for your team and your customers at Bird's Nest, but we're here to learn a little bit more about you. So five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Jane Cay: Well, weirdest or stupidest, I am. I love online. Like I'm an online grocery. I don't even enter supermarkets anymore and sometimes I do get it quite wrong. So not once but two weeks in a row, I managed to order, I thought I was ordering eight apricots and I ordered eight punnets of apricot. Needless to say, my family was very sick of apricots. So yes, I just can get that quite wrong. Particularly in the fruit and veggie department.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Oh, that's great. I might change that question actually to the stupidest thing you've ever bought online. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Jane Cay: I really love what Grace Brennan has done with Bye from the Bush Marketplace. And I just, it's just, I love the community building aspect of what she's doing and the connecting of country to city and then also just uncovering all these really great new and up and coming and innovative regional businesses that are, you know, playing in the E commerce and digital space sometimes for the first time. It's really exciting.
Nathan Bush: I can imagine that you are constantly coming across new retail e commerce ideas out your.
Jane Cay: Oh yeah. I mean, that's the exciting thing about this space, you know, it's just so disruptive and there's so many new ideas for how to solve problems, you know, and there's real problems that can make a difference in people's lives if you can solve them.
Nathan Bush: What's the one thing that you think regional entrepreneurs need or are asking for to help excel in E commerce?
Jane Cay: One of the challenges that I hear About a lot is, is. Is just getting the product from where they are to where it needs to go and fast enough. And you know, I mean, gosh, the floods of this year have, you know, to see some of the footage that even, you know, that Buy from the Bush have even shown on their Instagram where you've got literally people putting things in dinghies to get it from their home, to get it into town, to get it to the truck. So yeah, the logistics can be super complicated.
Nathan Bush: Makes sense. All right, number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Jane Cay: Look, I think this is fascinating that people are still selling things that they don't actually have. And I'm blown away by the stats on this because there's a publication that comes out that talks about the stats of how many things people are selling that they don't actually have in stock. And I experienced it personally this week. So just for obviously research purposes, I participated in the Black Friday sales and only yesterday, which is two weeks after, more than two weeks after I made this purchase, I got an email saying, you know, this thing I ordered was out of stock and would I like refund. So two weeks later I'm told that like, that is a pretty horrible experience.
Nathan Bush: Yep, yep.
Jane Cay: And then also the delayed dispatch, I think has been incredible. Like, I know that's a really intensely busy sale period, but it gives us all a really bad rap when, you know, people are not even posting things out from like two weeks later, things are being posted like. So I think, you know, for us, honestly for that, even that weekend, if you ordered by one o' clock on the Monday, we got it out. We got it out that day. Literally everyone drops everything. Like the head of marketing, the head of buying, everyone knows that that day we're packing and we just come in and we get those parcels out because that's what like, then people can rely on you. They can rely that they can order your same day dispatch. They'll get their thing. So anyway, that's end of rant.
Nathan Bush: It's a great rant because I think it's such a great indicator of a sustainable business because delays in dispatch or out of stock, you know, has the flow on effects of unproductivity around more customer emails, more admin, more refunds, all the stuff that doesn't turn into customer advocates and sales.
Jane Cay: Right, yeah. And it just reduces overall people's trust in online shopping. And you know, you know, they've come out of a period where they've had to rely on us, you know, and now they don't have to rely on us. So if you want them to be loyal to an online channel, then you need to make that online channel reliable.
Nathan Bush: Yep, 100%. It's simple, right?
Jane Cay: It just seems quite simple. Don't sell shit you don't have.
Nathan Bush: That's right. Number four, you gave us a great book recommendation in our main podcast, but I'm going to ask you again, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Jane Cay: I did. Which was a Patrick Blensoni book, the Advantage. But at the moment, my obsession for this year has been, and I'm sure all your readers probably know about it, but I've just discovered Atomic Habits by James Clear. And you know, it's just the thing I find so powerful is his quote around, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And that's so true. And it's been super powerful for me to remind myself that a lot of that cumulative gain comes from incremental steps. Just incremental. Incremental. And consistency, consistency, consistency.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. I reckon when you've published your Dad's book of 100 sayings that you need your own book, you need to pull these sayings and inspirations into one book because there's so many and they're all gold. So, yes, number five, finish this sentence. The future of retail is up to us to define. What are you most excited about defining?
Jane Cay: Well, I just think that it's so exciting that, you know, I really feel like it's up to our imagination, you know, and you know, certainly we get presented with dilemmas and then we can think of the most creative way of solving them. But you know, even when we first designed our store, we had a 2,000 square meter warehouse behind a 200 square meter store. And we're like, how do we show our whole range in here? And this is 10 years ago. And I remember we built, you know, we built our website instead of add to cart, which is very relevant considering we had add to change room. So, you know, you came into this store and we had laptops everywhere and you could add the entire range that's on our e commerce site in this little store. And then we were in the change rooms and literally iPads were there and you could shop from the entire range. So and people would just come in and say, wow, like we've shopped all over the world and New York, we've never seen anything like this. So how did you come up with this? And we were like, oh, well, we just imagined it. We just thought, this is the problem. How do we solve it? So it's generally up to us to define.
Nathan Bush: I love it. And I think that sums up so well what you've done with Bird's Nest. Everything from your RE hatch to the Will It Suit Me feature to the nest days that we talked about. There's so much stuff that you're doing is that is totally unique. And you're like, well, why can't we do it a bit differently?
Jane Cay: Yeah, let's just make it up, break the rules. That's the great thing about E Commerce.
Nathan Bush: So good. Jane, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Jane Cay: Cheers.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Jane, jump back into episode 263, where Jane shares the detail on the unique Bird's Nest Will this Suit Me feature? I hadn't seen this before and it's fantastic. She also shares the unusual place where she finds solace in times of stress and shares some of the best business wisdom advice you could wish to know, courtesy of her old man. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
