Dean Jones: Our customers became so fanatical about using our offering. It wasn't just another transactional relationship. We knew we were deeply changing her consumption behavior. I can just keep that part of my wardrobe kind of in the cloud and I can stream my wardrobe like I stream many other things in my life. That's the future of the kind of e commerce tech stack. We're living proof of that.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at e commerce talent agency E Suite. Today's guest is a retailer who who also happens to operate the largest laundry of consumer grade clothing in Australia, able to clean 15,000 articles of clothing per day. I'm still not sure whether they get through my kids socks and jocks, but they'd give it a good go of course. My guest is Dean Jones, co founder and CEO of fashion rental business Glam Corner. Glam Corner started in 2012 with Dean and his wife Audrey who went out to solve the problem of the fashion industry being the second most unsustainable industry in the world. Neither had a fashion background but they wanted to create a vision to accelerate the transition to a more circular and sustainable fashion system. Today they operate out of a 5,000 square meter fulfillment centre in the middle of Sydney. They have 130 people on the team, 30,000 articles of clothing and rotation and they rent out up to 70 tons of clothes every month. In this episode we discuss how Glam Corner have mastered their quality control process to know exactly when a garment has reached the end of its life cycle and it can be up to 60 times. They also discuss how they've gone from hacking together a custom built system in five weeks to a fully custom platform that now entires their entire business. And we also hear why Dean thinks that instant deliverability led by drones. Drones is the future differentiator in E commerce. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with Glam Corner CEO and co founder Dean Jones. Dean, welcome to ADD to cart.
Dean Jones: Nathan, thanks for having me.
Nathan Bush: My pleasure. We were just discussing a bit of the lockdown and I've actually got the Glam Corner site up on my screen at the moment. And the first thing that I see is hire designer clothing for any occasion. I can imagine occasions have taken a bit of a beating recently.
Dean Jones: Oh, well, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, when people aren't allowed to have social lives, there's a part of our business that obviously suffers from that, but there's also been some interesting parts of the business that have been incredibly resilient during a time like this. And. And so, you know, I'm happy to kind of share some of the learnings from it. Some of them were deliberate. Some of them were totally accidental. Both cases, I'm incredibly grateful that we did them. But, yeah, I'm happy to talk about it, mate. For sure. Awesome. Been a hell of a ride.
Nathan Bush: We'll dive into it. But for anyone who isn't familiar with Glam Corner, can you share how you came up with the idea and what Glam Corner stand for?
Dean Jones: Absolutely. Well, so Glam Corner is on a mission to accelerate the transition to more circular and sustainable fashion system. My wife, Audrey and I built this business. We founded it back in 2012 when we realized that the average Australian woman really only wears about one third of what's in her wardrobe. The other two thirds, we discovered, was a stockpile of items that she had purchased for single occasions and events in her life, but then never wore it again. And so, to us, and Audrey was that quintessential customer. And not only did that feel incredibly wasteful to us, we felt that fundamentally that was just a bad deal. And so when we realized that there was a problem, there was a problem where the customer deserves something better, we did a bit of homework around how universal is this problem, Asking close friends, family. We found out it was actually very common. This was a common issue that most women had in their lives. But also we realized who became our eventual customer was already solving this problem at a really small scale, borrowing and sharing clothing with her close friends and family. So this is actually not a new behavior to our customer. It's something she'd been doing her entire life. And kind of like how Uber didn't invent carpooling. You know, carpooling has been around for a long time. Uber just introduced a technology to amplify that existing behavior. And since we realized there's an opportunity here, we. Our hypothesis was, if we built the largest wardrobe in the country, could our customer come and just borrow from us whenever they liked and ideally pay a fraction amount of money to remove that kind of burden of ownership that was being imposed on that customer? So that was the Initial reason why the business was founded, a simple problem trying to give a customer a better deal.
Nathan Bush: And was it something that you came up with, like in one instant, yourself and Audrey together, or did it kind of evolve over time?
Dean Jones: It evolved over time, maybe over the course of a few weeks and months where Audrey just had that problem, struggled to find solutions elsewhere, and we just kept bouncing off each other. Audrey and I have been quite entrepreneurial people since we met, especially Audrey. And so we realized over time, actually, why is nobody doing this here? And even when we looked around the world and we discovered Rent the Runway in the US which is a lot bigger now than back then, but even then we said, why has nobody done this here? This is such a perfect solution for a common problem. Let's give it a try. Let's see if it can add some value to people's lives. You know, fast forward nine years, we've got 130 people on the payroll. We rent out even now, 50, 60, 70 tons of clothing a month and have hundreds of thousands of customers around the country that we've solved this problem for. Is it insulted for her that she now outsources a large part of her wardrobe to us? Her wardrobe has shrunk because she now knows, actually, I can just keep that part of my wardrobe kind of in the cloud. And I can stream my wardrobe like I stream many other things in my life. Music, Netflix. And for the same reason why you don't have CDs and DVD racks in your lounge room anymore. Our vision is that in the coming years, especially coming 5, 10 years, our customer won't have a huge silo of unused clothing in her wardrobe. That feels like it feels so broken when you think about it.
Nathan Bush: I love the analogy to music and CDs. It's great, 100%.
Dean Jones: And that was really where this business began. And we set out just trying to give that customer a better deal. What's really fascinating, Nath, is along that journey, we discovered something we didn't expect to discover. Audrey and I are not from the fashion industry. We're from the finance industry. The further into the fashion industry we got, the more we realized we didn't like particularly how wasteful the fashion industry is or has become. We were shocked to discover over time that the global fashion industry is the second most polluting industry on the planet. It's got a global carbon footprint rivaled only by the global oil refining industry. I mean, that's shocking. It's unacceptable. And so we realized fashionmental is not a silver bullet answer. But when 20 people are able to share a single item and making sure it's preened and cleaned in between back to good as new, that's 19 other items that never needed to be manufactured in the first place, which is a 95% reduction in the footprint required to satisfy the same amount of demand. And that's when we realized, wow, far out. This is most likely the only time in our lives that we'll be in the driver's seat of an opportunity to have an impact this positive on an industry. No matter how entrepreneurial someone is, sometimes just a You find yourself at the right place at the right time. I'm the first person to admit this is probably the only time in my life that I'm in the right place at the right time. And that matters a lot when it comes to success in business. But having an impact like this, that's where our mission evolved to purely just trying to solve a simple problem for a customer. Deserve better. To being an accelerator of the transition to what we see as an inevitable thing for the fashion industry. The fashion industry will become more circular and more sustainable. We want to try to bring that forward by a decade or so. And if we can do that, mate, we will have succeeded and we'll be really proud of what we've achieved.
Nathan Bush: And it's interesting that you said right place at the right time, but also that when you went into this, that Rent the Runway was also a new concept, as I could imagine that sustainability probably didn't have the amplification that it does now. Didn't have the huge uptake in subscription. There was a lot of trends that you're ahead of the curve on there. How did you model? And I'm assuming that there's a significant investment when you're trying to create Australia's wardrobe that you can draw upon. How did you have confidence that the investment at that point in time would pay off?
Dean Jones: Oh, yeah, that's a really good question. Because being perfectly positioned to a combination of a lot of trends, it's very in vogue in the fashion industry right now to be sustainable and circular, which is great. We're a huge beneficiary of that. There's plenty of trends also that we benefited from that we were just in the right place at the right time to try to act like we knew all that was coming and we perfectly timed it. That would be. It's just not believable. I wouldn't buy it. So how did we know that we were going to be successful? Nathan comes back to our customers. We've been a very customer centric business from day one, especially when our product and our offering was so novel. You know, if you just want to sell another, another burger or another widget online, it's still hard, but it's, it's incrementally easier than doing that. Plus it being completely foreign to the end customer. But you know, that is ultimately going to be a better offering for her. It's going to be a high quality offering at a lower price point. We wanted to offer designer quality premium brands at a fast fashion price point. And that's hard as it turned out. Super hard, mate, and so much harder than we envisaged. But it was with the customer in mind that if we can do that for her. And early on we had to bend over backwards for our customers. You know, in our first few hundred customers, I can remember, I remember vividly the first dozen or so, Nathan May, we took a bath. Like we didn't make any money out of that. We were purely sending customers things. That was an imperfect offering where we refunded her all the money. We refunded it just to figure out how do you get the offering right. But we knew with every one of those steps when the customer came to us and said, wow, you've totally solved this particular issue I've had that no one's ever been able to solve for me. Thank you. That gave us faith that we're onto something here. Our customers became so fanatical about using our offering. It wasn't just another transactional relationship. We knew we were deeply changing her consumption behavior. Like at a really fundamental level, which is unique, I think is unique from just selling something slightly better or slightly cheaper.
Nathan Bush: Australian brand Roli Nation makes footwear that is lightweight and the favorites of suitcase stuffers around the globe. So when Rolling Nation wanted to put a greater footage focus on direct to consumer, they migrated to Shopify plus with integrations into Gorgeous for customer service, Smile for Loyalty, Klaviyo for direct marketing and Okendo for customer reviews, Rolly Nation were able to deliver a site that was as lightweight as their shoes. They immediately achieved a 62% improvement in page speed, which contributed to a 3.5% increase in conversion. As Limp Biscuit would say, they're now rolling, rolling, rolling. To read more of Rollie Nation's story and to see other case studies, visit the customer sections on shopify.com.
Nathan Bush: There would have been, I assume, a big education piece to market early on is that I assume that it's easy to understand who your customer might be but this is a brand new model for them that you'd have to educate them on on how it works.
Dean Jones: Oh, absolutely. Everything that you could imagine we would have to help educate the customer about and convince her is better value for money. We had to go through that pain. Is it easier to return it? Well, we're just going to give you an express prepaid return satchel that you can just chuck in the post box and we'll take care of everything. That alone is super hard to make sure that the customer just gets familiar with. Oh yeah, I know that's just going to be in the box. When it comes to turns out do I know it's going to be microbial level cleaner than if I bought it off the rack. I never thought Nathan, we'd have to be in the laundry business mate. But here we are, our next generation laundry which is currently being built in our new fulfillment center that I'm in right now. It's been designed to clean and preen up to 15,000 articles of clothing a day. The guys who've designed it have said that'll single handedly make us the largest cleaner of consumer grade clothing in the country by like a country mile. Because they said if anyone else was cleaning that much clothing per day, we'd know about it because we'd be trying to sell them cleaning products.
Nathan Bush: That's interesting. It's funny that businesses in the US such as Walmart have started offering out their fulfillment services to other retailers and E Commerce because they've got that so down pat. That fulfillment process. Is that something you would consider with cleaning that that's a separate service offering in itself at some point?
Dean Jones: Oh absolutely. We're already doing it. As you know, we've launched partnerships with David Jones, with Spell, with Camilla, and there's actually a long list of other brands that are coming online. I can't share exactly who they are yet because maybe by the time the podcast is live some of those more names are coming up. Let's say they're large household names. It's part of our mission. We've never wanted to monopolize fashion Mental. Whenever a big brand wants to build an offering in Fashionmental, we've always said come and partner with us. We've built the platform, we can license a portion of it to you and we take care of the hard stuff. If they bring the product and list it on the marketplace, we will ship it to the customers, we'll bring it back, clean it and print it ready for the next person. Sounds easy. We've Spent almost a decade perfecting it and it's way harder than you would imagine.
Nathan Bush: What are some of those conversations like at the start where say it's a Spell and we won't call them out specifically, but you've got brands who have built up great presences, have great following, are selling clothing from $200 to two grand and they're making good money and then all of a sudden you go, why don't you rent your clothes out? What's the typical response?
Dean Jones: Absolutely. And Spell's a great example actually, because they're what a phenomenal brand with a customer base that I would describe as fanatics about their brand and their product. They've built such a great company and a great offering. So you're right. What more could you offer them or what more could they offer their customers? It comes down to how the customer's tastes and preferences are changing. Brands like Spell who take their sustainability journey very seriously in terms of their supply chain, ethical and sustainable supply chain through to just the consumption methods itself, right down to where possible to be as close as possible to carbon neutral shipping. So that they're a leader, I'd say are a real great example of local brands, big or small, that can do amazing things in becoming more circular, more sustainable. First of all, when we first started talking to them, they had mentioned they had many, many parts of their own customer base asking them about it. And that wasn't some trick. But I promise you that was not
Nathan Bush: our phantom, a little underhanded like little marketing to customers.
Dean Jones: That wasn't the PayPal model or the trying to stealth, try to trigger them to get the payment method. It happened quite organically and they came to us and we spoke about it. But when we were discussing exactly that question, how can you be confident it's not going to cannibalize your retail? We told them what We've known for 10 years almost now. Our typical customer who rents product from us was unlikely to be the person who was purchasing that off the rack for 10 times that price. The person who can afford it for 10 times that price probably will just continue to do so. What is great about Fashion Rental is suddenly the customer who is going to go to H and M or Zara for 79, $89 is now going to come and transact with you and your brand for that price point and she has access to your brand for the price point that is reasonable for her given that situation and your existing customers for the people who are going to buy from you anyway. Our data has shown for the instances in between where maybe she was going to go to one of the slightly more affordable option. Now she loves your brand anyway. This gives her another reason to transact with you. Just instead of being four times a year, she transact with you eight times a year. And when that penny drops for a lot of brands, that's where we realized we can help accelerate their journey commercially. It's a great opportunity for us all while really contributing to our mission to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and circular fashion system. So that happened quite organically.
Nathan Bush: There's probably a lot of social reputation there as well because you can imagine if you took Spell for example, you got one dress and it might get worn three, four times a year. All of a sudden you get eight dresses that have eight social outings, eight Instagram photos. It's everywhere.
Dean Jones: 100%. Nathan, we should get you in our social media marketing team, I swear. No, that's. You're exactly right. And what's fascinating, that's probably one more reason to flag someone like Spell is a great example. They make a limited, every, every season they make a limited edition of phenomenal product that sells out incredibly quickly and it creates so much demand that they can possibly supply the aftermarket. They noticed that the aftermarket for their products, especially social media buy swap sell groups were incredibly active that they just started asking themselves which makes sense for marketers and merchandisers in most businesses. If there's already a secondary market where my own customers are just swapping between themselves, maybe I could contribute to that. It's a commercial opportunity for my business. But also maybe it makes it an even better offering for the customer than just hoping for the best. When she jumps into the buy swap sell group like it's an indication that that secondary economy, that sharing economy, never going away. Why not just make it a part of your business?
Nathan Bush: It's a totally different model. Right? Yeah. Can you talk us through from an operational viewpoint? Because a lot of listeners will be very familiar with the traditional E commerce model. We buy goods cheap, we sell them a little bit more expensive, we work out the fulfillment process, we're away.
Nathan Bush: I can imagine it's very different from
Nathan Bush: you because first of all you've got a few ways that customers can get their hands on the product that there's one off subscription, there's subscription packages. And I saw that you're also retailing end of life fashion as well.
Nathan Bush: Can you talk us through the process
Nathan Bush: from getting stuff on the website all the way through to getting into customers hands?
Dean Jones: Oh, absolutely. Well, the first thing to flag is, yeah, the spectrum of service offering is kind of three tiers. There's our one time rental business. That's where our business began. All those things that you know you're only gonna wear at one time, you can borrow it from us. And obviously very, very focused in social occasions, especially weddings, birthdays, engagement parties, all the things people love. Doing that part of our business, as you might imagine, you know, we'd never be a rocket scientist. Imagine that part of it's been hit very hard by restrictions on social gatherings in the jurisdictions where that happens. Where there's amazing places like Queensland that are less affected, that customer is transacting exactly as she normally would. There's our subscription membership business, which is for all the other parts of our wardrobe or for our customers wardrobe where it actually was built in response to customer requests. What about for parts of my wardrobe where I wouldn't borrow it for four or five days, but I'd love to hang onto it for like a month? Blazers for work, blouses, tops, shirts, pants, skirts. Things that we wouldn't rent out in our traditional kind of event occasion driven one time rental business. And that's what we built our subscription product for. It's kind of like a library. You get three books at a time and as soon as you want another three books, you've got to return those three. And it kind of encourages that behavior. That's now 50% of our revenue actually. It's growing incredibly quickly and has been incredibly resilient during this time. Because what's been unexpected is that the customer who's working from home, whether she likes it or not, if she liked going into the office before or she'd been working home her entire career anyway. When it comes to zoom meetings throughout the week, internal or external, she still really cares about her fashion and how she portrays herself and what kind of clothing she wears. But her traditional methods of purchasing clothing at the store are closed. A lot of her. Even regular traditional online channels are sold out or the delivery timelines are way inflated at the moment. Suddenly the idea of having a simple fixed price of clothing that's just kind of arriving with no real attachment to arriving to her doorstep on a regular, is an incredible solution for her. And that part of our business has been incredibly resilient. And there's also. We signed up a lot of new customers to our offering who have maybe discovered it seems like for lack of a better alternative. And we're now changing her habits there and her wardrobe is now shrinking too, which is great. When she does go back to the office, that's a habit she's now built, which is interesting. And then a third part of our business, our marketplace business, which is a B2B part of our business at the moment that we let's platform that allows other brands to list their product. So for all of those offerings, when product arrives, we buy direct from the brands and in the secondary market, wherever there's good quality product, we'll get it, put it on our platform. Except for in the marketplace which comes through from directly from the contributors when it arrives here at our fulfillment center, we got a 5,000 square meter fulfillment center here in Regent's park, which is, we picked this spot because it's 30 minutes from everywhere. It's geographically in the center of Sydney. Next door to us is a big Amazon fulfillment center, which is. I know why they picked this site because the same reason we did. But it's a machine this place. It's amazing to watch. So all the items arrive in our docks in our fulfillment center. They get onboarded, they get RFID tagged. We've got an RFID tagging system. So we've got 30,000 articles of clothing in our inventory system. Tens of thousands of them are flying around in between us and customers at any one time. There's every day three or four thousand of them being processed and getting shipped out to customers. At a minimum on a busy day, it's five or six thousand articles of clothing.
Nathan Bush: And are you talking kind of uniques here? So if you're buying a dress from Spell, for example, are you buying kind of 1, 2, 3, 4 of each size?
Dean Jones: Oh yeah, whole size, runs dozens of styles and it's quite a well oiled machine now from photo shoot to tagging to inventory to now be as soon as it is physically with us, it'll be on the site within 24 to 48 hours. And that's an important part of the growth equation as well because if it's dormant for a week, that's a week that it's not earning its roi. Because that part of our business, Nathan, is fundamentally, it's an asset leasing business. We purchase the product typically for wholesale, but it's still in hundreds of dollars a unit. And we rent them out over their lifetime and make a very good return over their lifetime because it turns out very good quality clothing can last a very long time when it's cared for.
Nathan Bush: And how do you know when it reaches the end of that lifespan?
Dean Jones: Oh yeah, it's funny. We should always get you out. Merchandising teammate. I swear that too is really important. So our everyday, all these items get sorted, unpacked and go through our returns process. That's thousands of items. They're normally all totally processed by like mid morning and on their way into the laundry where they're being prioritized for cleaning and repairs if need be. We've got a seamstress team of five or six full time seamstresses just repairing Nick's tears. Whatever it is, it's a real craft. But you know, it is just clothing. It's easy to fix. But through that process there's various quality control checkpoints. I would actually argue our quality control checkpoints inbound and outbound are more robust than a traditional retailer. There's been some retailers and I won't name names. I've received things from that. I'm like, no one quality control check this on the way out is brand new. Why is no. 1 quality control check this. This would not have made it into a box for us one reason or another. Maybe it's easy to get complacent when you're selling stuff brand new to assume it's just in perfect condition. Yeah, there's so many quality control checks along the way that our team is well versed that when something is clearly no longer looking as good as new, it gets marked for resale clearance and we sell it off. And we have many customers who like to tens of thousands of people who like to just buy those because most of time they're sold out retail anyway. But they're very good quality coveted brands so they tend to disappear. So it's really the answer is that it just comes down to acknowledging that that's in inherent in offering a great quality offering to customers. How do we put our hand in our heart and promise our customers quality assurance? Yeah, we've got so many checks and balances throughout our fulfillment process that it would be difficult. You have to go out of your way. Even beyond human error. You have to go to your way to ship something that's not up to scratch.
Nathan Bush: So it's not a case of this item's been worn 20 times, time to go into retirement. It's literally a case by case scenario.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
Dean Jones: There's various checkpoints. Something could have, it'd be rare, but if something was only rented six or seven times but was looking pretty worn out, we wouldn't, it would be immediately dinged to be cleared. We've got items that rent it out 50, 60 times and still look brand new.
Nathan Bush: Wow.
Dean Jones: Because our cleaning, our cleaning Process. We use a completely wet care cleaning process. So it's, it's environmentally friendly, it's low energy intensity, it uses a fraction the amount of water that you would use in say a home machine and uses cleaning products that are activated at lower temperatures. So. And microbial level, disinfectant. So it is hand on heart cleaner than if you bought it off the rack somewhere.
Nathan Bush: That's fantastic.
Dean Jones: Yeah. Turns out it can be done. Can be done.
Nathan Bush: You know, it can be done.
Dean Jones: Like when you go to stay at a five star hotel, you get in the bed and you feel like it's fresh washed bed sheets, immaculately cleaned. There's been 200 other people sleep in that bed before you.
Nathan Bush: No, don't ruin it for us.
Dean Jones: I know. I think people inherently know that. But as long as it's up to scratch, we are very comfortable with it. And so that's really what has been pivotal to our success, is putting investment in the things that matter there where the customer is either pleasantly surprised or never let down. She opens a box from us and the item is cleaner and smells fresher than something she bought brand new.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes total sense.
Nathan Bush: And I found the unlimited plan really
Nathan Bush: interesting that you've got set up on the website.
Nathan Bush: So for those who haven't seen it,
Nathan Bush: $149 per month for an unlimited swap out of outfits.
Dean Jones: Yep.
Nathan Bush: I could imagine you get some very high use and some very low use customers.
Nathan Bush: How do you model that subscription service?
Dean Jones: Oh yeah. In short, incredibly, incredibly difficult. Where would you price an unlimited offering? And it took some time early on to calibrate, but the goal was we wanted to be as generous as possible. As long as it's a price point, we're not taking a bath. We wanted to give the customer free rein to say, use this service to supplement things you would have otherwise just bought and kept in your wardrobe to whatever extent you wish. What is interesting about that offering is there's some customers who like to hang onto that, offer that product for three months. There's some people who like to swap out that those products three or four times a month. What we did find was interesting and we had to test it to know just because it is still a physical product. So even if you want to binge, watch it and get a box delivered, turn it around and send it back, you can only do that so many times a month. But what we realized is we shouldn't get too hung up on that because why would anybody bother doing that? Why would they get something delivered to them, not wear it, send it back just to annoy us.
Nathan Bush: No one does the process for fun, right?
Dean Jones: Yeah. I think people have got better things to do with their time. And so we realized we look at the data. No one does that. I think the shortest timeframe of a turnaround is probably a couple of days. But it's not when we look at customer data. Whenever there's instances of that. It's mainly because they didn't like the fit and they had time to swap it out. That's the idea of it. Like it's super easy to just was mainly cause we had other customers who were renting product, trying it and sending it back. The same reason why big department stores have had customers wardrobe in them for ages where they buy it, wear it over the weekend and bring it back. We've always just asked ourselves if that's the customer behavior, why not just make that the product and just charge a fixed price for it and then you can do whatever you like. You got access to our wardrobe like your own. But it's just more stuff in it. And so that's actually come to a really good landing. And it's kind of put in perspective Nathan. It's 5% of the customers we've ever acquired but it's 50% of our revenue. So it's such a high quality offering for the customer who when she discovers it, she loves it that it just, it amplifies that where a customer maybe would have only transacted with us a couple of times a year is now transacting with us every month so that it stacks up suddenly it's an order of magnitude increase in customer lifetime value. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And I can imagine like you said before, forming those habits and once you fall into those habits, the old way of buying clothes would seem so bizarre. 100%.
Dean Jones: And our sense is it will feel that way and those things happen through time. But it just comes down to the only way you can change those habits. You must offer the customer something like materially better, not just a little bit better materially better at a better price point where the value for money equation is multiples better than what she was getting in the alternatives. And then that will succeed. Gravity will run its course there.
Nathan Bush: And from a fulfillment perspective where there's you're basically a two way fulfillment model where it relies on the customer fulfilling back to you. And we do this in traditional retail with returns but not to the scale that you're working at. Is there anything special in either the fulfillment setup or the partners that you're with to facilitate that Smoothly, Absolutely.
Dean Jones: We work with all the big courier companies, especially Australia Post Australia. Big shout out to Australia Post, their logistics challenge. I think people don't realize just how difficult their challenge is. One of the reasons why we picked the site for this fulfillment center is that it's eight minutes away from the Chullora Distribution centre, which is the largest distribution centre in the state for Australia Post I've been there to visit. Imagine a facility, football fields in size with conveyor belts like you see at the airport 24 7. And it does something like 48,000 parcels an hour or something like that, something crazy like that. And so we pick fulfillment partners that we know can support our journey at scale. But that's also why Australia Post has like every day, like between 7:30 and 8am Truckloads of return satchels being delivered here so our team can start processing it. Because there's a big whack of customers who we need to ship a big portion of those products to that very day. So we really rely on that network and those logistics partners to help us do what we offer to our customers.
Nathan Bush: And they're doing some really interesting stuff like that partnership with 7 11. I could imagine this plays into the hands of your busy customer where they can send parcels from a 7 11. But also Australia Post is setting up half their parcel locker network within 711 stores themselves.
Dean Jones: Yeah, and that's great. And while, you know, Australia Post is a real battleship, it's very difficult sometimes with big battleships to turn quickly. But when you think about it, I think all of us have had it. You've ordered something online and it gets carded, you get a card, oh God, I gotta go to the post office. It makes sense to just start building into the network various places where you can just pick it up. Because people's lives are very different now from working from home to working from the office to working from anywhere. It should be easy to get a delivery to you wherever you're going to be.
Nathan Bush: And you haven't chosen an easy business model. So I'm assuming you can't just go
Nathan Bush: pick up, say a Shopify platform plugin and away you go, right?
Dean Jones: No, you're right. I'm first person. Admit there's easier ways to make money. We've certainly picked a very challenging problem. But that's also part of the fun. And honestly that I think in any business, wherever you find true pain actually and suffering in solving the problem, that's where competitive advantage lies. Actually, you're right for some base offerings in say, fashion, apparel, Rental you could. When we first started the business, no you couldn't. But nowadays you could build it just out of the box quick, like Plug and Play rental offering. But the logistics component and the offering as it's evolved from our subscription membership to our Marketplace business enterprise platform, basically you can't do that out of the box. There's only one way to do that and that's to build it brick by brick. So that's what has become a competitive advantage. We're light years ahead of anyone. Not that others could do it, don't get me wrong. But we are light years ahead of anyone else who wants to do it.
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Nathan Bush: I read in doing the research, I read from 2015, back when you were quoted around launching a new Magento platform in five weeks. That must seem like a lifetime ago compared to where the business is at now.
Dean Jones: Yeah, wow. No, it does, I tell you, that's. It's. What an interesting. That is an interesting example because when we went, when we were going live for one of our large fulfillment by Glam corner partners, one of the requirements was can you do it quickly? We went away to the team and asked ourselves that. Our team is just well trained, well drilled here. What do you do in this sort of situation? We came back and we said we can get you live within like four or five weeks. So it's funny how that experience has taught our. And as our business grew, our team is just familiar with that pace because sometimes that means the difference between where they're capturing opportunity or not.
Nathan Bush: Well, especially when you built something custom and your whole business model is built around that. So if you toggle one thing, you've got to put all the checks and balances in place that it doesn't toggle something else off. Right.
Dean Jones: That's Right. And look, it's got to be iterative. That Magento platform we started with was so instrumental to getting to where we went to next. But in that interim time has been completely replaced by what I'd say is very robust but incomplete fully integrated e commerce and fulfillment marketplace system.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. One thing I did notice around the online journey for your current website is that you do have a single customized checkout page where the trend at the moment is obviously to break down the checkout into multiple pages. Three or four.
Nathan Bush: At some point you've got one single checkout page.
Nathan Bush: Is there any science or reasoning behind
Nathan Bush: that that you're seeing?
Dean Jones: There absolutely is made. And I wouldn't underestimate also how hard that was to do single page checkout to build it our way. A lot of the alternatives out there, you're right. Whether it's a multi page checkout or a single page, there is some out of the box solutions. Without revealing too much, let's just say our vision for what a future checkout will look like. We wanted to be masters of our own destiny there and the various things our customers will transact at that checkout or that our partners customers will transact. We wanted to be masters of our own destiny there. So we rebuilt it from scratch. It was actually really hard. Way harder than we thought it would be too, but totally worth it because now whatever our customer is coming to transact for, we can build a really seamless and easy integrated experience for her across devices. Yeah, I shouldn't reveal any more than that, but let's just say you're going to transact and whenever, whether it be a E commerce transaction or a micro transaction, we can now we're now we've de risked that completely. We can build whatever we want. That's going to be pretty cool.
Nathan Bush: And is it set up like a headless scenario?
Dean Jones: Yes, yeah, exactly. That's the future of the kind of E commerce tech stack. Yeah, absolutely. We're living proof of that.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. From a tech perspective, obviously AR must be on the radar from virtual fittings and all that sort of gear.
Nathan Bush: Is there anything else that's got you
Nathan Bush: excited from a future facing perspective?
Dean Jones: Yes, many things I think AR for sure. But I feel like that will happen organically and we see many opportunities to do it. But also it'll be customer LED and product led, but there's a lot of players already experimenting with it which is really interesting. But I think you're right, that's coming and it's going to be great for us. I'm More. Believe it or not, I get more excited about the real world. Whether it's like in the physical atoms of the universe world. I feel like I get more excited about drone deliveries than ar. That's just me though.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
Dean Jones: And we talk with, you know, we have friends at Wing. We have friends. We, we. I got our own drone to experiment with this. As soon as they allow it, we'll, we'll be probably delivering it ourselves. I don't know.
Nathan Bush: Just, just go across the road and
Nathan Bush: steal some of Amazon's.
Dean Jones: We might, we'll be keeping an eye on. Whenever they start launching or if they put a helipad on the roof, I'll be very suspicious.
Nathan Bush: Just attach some parcels to wherever they're going and just sabotage their delivery.
Dean Jones: Exactly. We've got a little drone for our security, just for fun, you know. But I'm like, why don't we use this to experiment with, like, localized in this postcode delivery? What's the worst that could happen? Probably not, you know, totally allowed, but if we stay below a certain altitude, maybe. I don't know. So that's, I get excited about. How do you make the retailing experience so seamless that. And you're seeing it already. Like when you think about the trick. This is my observation, think about the trajectory of online retailing experience and delivery. One thing is for certain, the amount of time between transaction and being physically in your hands is exponentially decreasing. Like to zero.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Dean Jones: It's got, that's the trend to zero. And we see even people like Amazon, like, they're the benchmark in terms of speed. They deliver at light speed. And I think that's a bar for all online retailers to take very seriously because the customer will just start to expect it in the same way they expect Uber Eats to deliver it in a very timely manner. That's where it's going. So I think the future, the time frame of delivery expectations to customers is going to narrow dramatically exponentially. And retailers, it won't just be a competitive advantage, it'll be an expectation, it'll be an assumption. You know, like in the last 10 years, customers just came to assume you had a website. Whereas 10 years ago an online retailer was like an innovative thing to be doing. But now it's just an expectation. Of course you have a website, everyone has a website. In probably five plus ten years from now, the delivery timeframes will be so short, it'll just be an assumed. Like, of course I'll be able to get that instantly. I feel like that's where it's trending and I think the challenge there is do you have the logistical capability to do it and not be too reliant on third parties? We think a lot about that.
Nathan Bush: And do you have the margin built into your product to allow that kind of service?
Dean Jones: Exactly, exactly. That's my view. I think there's a lot of other very exciting things for the customer coming through the pipe, including AR and artificial intelligence. I think that's going to be happening a lot faster than people expect and it'll feel very normal. A lot faster than people expect. Yeah, yeah. In house devices like Google Nest and Position Zero, how do you just ask for something and it just arrived? I think that's where we're trying to position ourselves to prepare for that because it just, it's almost obvious that's where things are heading.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, sounds obvious when you say it.
Dean Jones: I don't know. I don't know. Maybe we've convinced ourselves.
Nathan Bush: Dean, thank you so much for joining us. I love hearing the glam corner story
Nathan Bush: and what you guys are doing. Really shaking up fashion and the idea of E commerce on its head.
Nathan Bush: So thank you for sharing.
Dean Jones: Thanks Anthony. It's my pleasure. And yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it.
Nathan Bush: Imagine being a banker going into the fashion industry and ending up being the owner of the largest consumer grade laundry in Australia. Talk about a spin cycle. Oh boom. Proud of that one. Here are my three most actionable takeaways from my conversation with Dean. Number one, develop customer habits. I really like Dean's line. The only way you can change customer habits, you must offer the customer something materially better, not just a little bit better. You really need to raise the bar if you want to break habits. But once you do, crack customer habits and transition them into your business can be very lucrative. Number two, unprofitable customer centricity. Sounds like a really bad business plan, right? But Dean told us the story of the early days when they were unapologetically customer centric, often at the expense of becoming profitable. But those early days they were critical to getting feedback and changing the model to accelerate their path to profitability. The customer centric approach won't always make the tills ring straight away, but it sets the foundation for a sustainable business if you take actions from the feedback you get from your customers. Number three, finding your angle. As you heard from Dean, we never really talked about clothes or fashion and honestly probably would be be a really boring conversation if I talked about fashion. But it was all about their mission and Dean's got that nailed. The same goes when he was selling into his retail partners like Spell. He addressed their cannibalization concerns by saying that it would give them more exposure as customers wouldn't have to buy cheaper, less desired brands with customers being able to get into the retailer's clothes more often. Dean has an angle for every to get his point across and I think you saw that today. Have a think if you're a founder about the objections you will run into. Find your angle and don't be afraid to go over and over and over that angle to get your point across. To finish up, I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener about to cut and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to to addtocart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops, as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies tools and research, sign up to the High 5 free Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from. Sign up at 12 high 12h I g h.comau forward/high five and the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com au we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to cart.
