Brendan Hartman: Like to have a good time, we have a laugh, but we still get shit done. Some customers try and tell us we should make board shorts, which is just not going to happen. Yeah, that's blasphemy. Why would you choose a small bird? Why wouldn't you choose like an eagle or like a falcon or something?
[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. There are many terms that have entered the lexicon of Australian lingo. Flame and galah fair shake of the sauce bottle. Nice, Gary. But perhaps none are quite as treasured, unique and potentially baffling to other nations as the Budgie Smuggler. I mean, who needs a great swathe of material billowing around your legs when a carefully positioned streamlined triangle of Lycra
Nathan Bush: will do the trick?
Nathan Bush: So iconic has this item of clothing become that a successful brand has grown from the term Budgie Smuggler. The brand started out as a bit of a laugh in an Aussie backyard when some mates decided to ride Budgie Smuggler on the back of some Speedo style swimmers. Growing from selling a thousand pairs of smugglers a year to over 100,000 pairs internationally, Budgie Smuggler now has a kids and a women's range. General manager Brendan Hartman joins me today to share the Smuggler's code and their secrets to success. We discuss why it's a no brainer for them to keep the manufacturing process right here at home, why they regularly perform the funny uncle test when assessing custom orders, and why responding to customer suggestions will always be part of their business. Unless that customer suggests producing board shorts. Bloody oath. What a crime against the Budgie.
Nathan Bush: Never.
Nathan Bush: So, thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with Brendan Hartman, general manager at Budgie Smuggler.
Nathan Bush: Brendan, welcome to Add to Card.
Brendan Hartman: G'. Day. How are you?
Nathan Bush: Good. Thanks for joining us. That's right. What's going on today?
Brendan Hartman: It's a nice sunny day in Sydney. I don't know, there's not too much. We're all just gearing up for summer now.
Nathan Bush: Well, that brings me to my first and probably most important question. We'll leap Straight into it.
Brendan Hartman: Sure, let's go.
Nathan Bush: How do you pull off a pair of Budgie smugglers?
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, so. So I'd say it's. I mean, I think you know where the brand is. So I'd say it's on brand.
Nathan Bush: It's on brand.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's nothing too flash going on.
Nathan Bush: I am, I'm actually building a pool
Nathan Bush: at the moment and I keep threatening the kids that I'm going to bring them all out because I've hidden them for a long time for public swimming. But now that I've got my own pool, it's time.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, mate, I'd love to know a
Nathan Bush: little bit more of the Budgie Smuggler story if you can. For those who don't know it, can you give us the origins and where you guys are at, especially in the e commerce world?
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, sure. So originally started in the backyard from two mates that just thought it was funny. People agreed with them. They literally hand wrote the name Buddiesmugher on the back of just a pair of Speedos they bought from Rebel and it kind of grew from there. They looked into the trademarking the name and figured out how to make them here in Sydney and that was kind of the foundations of the business. From there, I mean, one of the greatest things those boys did was actually was trademark the name because now it's pretty difficult to trademark a colloquial term.
Nathan Bush: Sure. And does that, does that go internationally as well?
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah. So it's across the board. So since. So, I mean, the two boys that started it are now no longer part of the business. They literally, it was an expensive hobby for them. They kind of just thought it was funny and just had nothing else to do. So they did this and they handballed it to Adam, who is the current owner, Adam Lindforth. He took over in about 2008 and literally, like I say, it wasn't even off the ground at that time. So Lenny's basically had it from the start and it's turned into what it is today from his bedroom and apartment in Manly. But yeah, that trademark goes worldwide now and there's a few different catego. But yeah, the main one is swimwear and the term Budgie Smuggler.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. And if people aren't familiar with the colloquialism of Budgie Smuggler and you're introducing them to it internationally, how does it translate?
Brendan Hartman: With raised eyebrows a lot of the time is the usual response. And the funniest culture so far is the American culture where they just don't understand this like self deprecating humor. Whereas if you try to explain it to someone in the UK and potentially other countries, a lot of them kind of get. It takes a little bit longer in the US where they kind of don't. They're like, why would you choose a small bird? Why wouldn't you choose like an eagle or like a falcon or something? It's like it's not the point. It's a small bird that looks like it's stuck.
Nathan Bush: Why would you put a bird down your pants?
Brendan Hartman: Exactly. It's bizarre.
Nathan Bush: It's weird. Yeah. So what I love and sorry, before we get into that.
Brendan Hartman: Sure.
Nathan Bush: Primarily E commerce sales.
Brendan Hartman: Yep. Always been online until recently. So we, we always had it online and we kind of just followed, followed the, the trends that we were seeing on our own online store. We had a strong base in Sydney. We had a. I'm sure we'll touch on it. We had a focus on just looking after our own backyard because until you're established with a strong sort of consumer base, you've got nothing to really fall back on. So we focused locally and that was where we had our first pop up store. We used to do them for like long weekends, weekend before Christmas, Australia Day weekend and October long weekend and those sorts of things. And then we did a longer pop up for about three months from November through to the end of January one Christmas which was awesome. And we still had people turning up to our office, office which was an apartment looking to buy them like months after we'd closed that pop up store. So that was kind of our indicator to go. Maybe we should give this crack. And it's great. The stores. So we have two now, we have one in Manly, one in Bondi and hopefully soon some more. But we kind of don't necessarily look at them as like sales locations. We kind of see it as like almost like a home base or like a destination for people that do follow the brand to go to. They can physically see the pairs. There's usually some pairs in there that haven't come out yet that we haven't put online which is a nice little surprise for people when they do go in. They get to talk to people like our staff that just love the brand and they have some inside gossips for them. It's kind of more a place for people to go to like I said destination rather than just a store.
Nathan Bush: You've got some pretty full on fans, don't you?
Brendan Hartman: We do. Some of them are very committed smugglers we'll call them.
Nathan Bush: A nice way to Put it, what's the most commitment you've seen given to the brand by one of your customers?
Brendan Hartman: Look, we see people, like, people send us photos of them getting married, like standing literally at the altar. And if it's not at the altar, it's the photos afterwards where they run off and get photos by the beach or in a paddock or whatever. And it's usually a lot of the time, I got to say, strong percentage is mostly it's just the dudes, but lately we've seen matching swimwear, bride and groom and stuff like that. Those ones always impress me because it's like you've thought ahead for your special day to include us or our brand as part of your day. So it's, it's phenomenal. We love it. It's quite heartwarming.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's really cool. And it's got that Aussie larrikin charm to it.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: But it feels like there's still a message around body positivity behind it all as well as this seems to be a serious, serious vibe underneath it all as well.
Brendan Hartman: Absolutely. So a lot of, a lot of swimwear brands that are similar to our style in terms of the cut of swimwear. I mean, not to drag them through the dirt, but I mean, a lot of it's focused on either elite performance or looking really ripped, which is only really the small percentage of the population. Like it doesn't really. It's not relatable to many people. And I think it just comes back to how we are as a group here, the type of friends we have, the people around us that have helped sort of form who we wanted to target. And that was just the top of the bell curve. Yeah. Everyday average blokes and girls now that we have women's swimwear. So it's just your everyday people, like it's not built specifically for performance, it's just built for comfort. And it's the attitude of not taking yourself too seriously.
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Nathan Bush: what I do love is no matter how big you've got and expanded internationally, it still feels really homegrown. It's not like you've gone to this really slick kind of design. You've stayed very kind of accessible I suppose is a way to put it. Is that and even some of your language, like on your returns page you've got. And I'll pull out a quote here. If you've bought them for a gift, we won't be complete tight asses. Just let us know the situation and they should be okay to exchange. Outside of this period. That's pretty broad and pretty casual for a returns policy. It is.
Brendan Hartman: I mean there's obviously some finer details surrounding the returns which comes into personal hygiene and legalities. But yeah, I mean a lot of the time we found the biggest pain point for customers is just talking to a business. And we're thankfully we're still at a size where we can do that. We can actually be on the other side of the phone and give them a genuine conversation. So it was more about just being again like relatable to people to show that we are people on the other side of the phone or an email. Because often it's a. For some corporates, it's sort of like a faceless organization with strict terms and conditions and whatnot. We kind of just wanted to show that we're real people and like we get it.
Nathan Bush: Do you think leading with that kind of language and policy means that you generally have nicer customer interactions and less likely to take the piss?
Brendan Hartman: I mean, we haven't had too many poor interactions. So maybe, I mean, you know, there's the odd one here and there where unfortunately couriers and postage services don't arrive on time. Which I mean, I hate to say it's not our fault but you know, we're using those people so it is partly our fault. But yeah, I mean, the conversation, a lot of, a lot of times you'll find if and if anyone's listening for customer service side of things, people are far less confrontational on the phone. They, you know, and they respect a phone call as well. They don't get treated with a dear sir or madam kind of style of email response that if just. We have a policy here that if anyone emails and they do seem slightly disgruntled, we get on the phone with them straight away. Because, you know, as a disgruntled customer, not that we have many, but you want it resolved like asap. You don't want to wait six hours to get an email back. Like, if we can call them and solve it within minutes, then that's kind of how we go about it. Again, it just shows that. Shows them that we are just people on the other side. It's not a. Not a sort of machine.
Nathan Bush: I think it also shows proactivity that you're not hiding from the problem or you're putting it into a queue. It's like, now we'll get on the front foot for this and we'll try and sort it out quickly.
Brendan Hartman: Exactly. And again, just trying to show that we're people, like in sort of the retail world or just any sort of business world people. You'll find that people stay connected to the brand. If they do have a problem and it gets resolved, as opposed to someone who orders first time, it gets delivered perfectly. You probably never hear from again. They got what they wanted, but there's some sort of emotional connection where you go, you know what? These guys did stuff up my order and they were so good about it. They refunded me and still gave me all my stuff. Like, I'll definitely go back to them. So it's a trust thing. It's a relationship thing.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And I could imagine you've got a double whammy coming up, obviously going into summer and also going into peak sales Christmas season. And how are you feeling about the fulfillment network at the moment?
Brendan Hartman: I mean, yeah, it's kind of out of our control. We can sort of pass on as much information as possible to the people that will buy from us over that Black Friday Christmas period, even into January. Obviously, Black Friday Christmas will be the peak. Unfortunately, we're at the mercy of the delivery providers. Uh, and. And yeah, all we can do is just pass that on. We. We set like early cutoff dates just to be almost certain. But yeah, we'll. We'll do our best. We'll do our best with a small
Nathan Bush: product, especially if they're buying singular pair of budgie smugglers.
Nathan Bush: Is there any ways that you can
Nathan Bush: get around the parcel dilemma?
Nathan Bush: Is there any way that you can
Nathan Bush: send them through mail or other ways
Nathan Bush: if they're really Small.
Brendan Hartman: We used to, we used to send them and we used to get them through the post office's letters. And because they're in, we've got like recyclable and compostable snap lock bags for our pairs. So you used to be able to squeeze all the air out and then seal it shut and you'd be able to slide it through the post box as a letter. And we used. It was funny because it cost a fraction of what it cost to send a parcel. But sadly we don't, we don't get away with that anymore. Now that we're slightly bigger and we're sending, you know, a couple thousand parcels a week. It's, it's, it's come a long way from when I first came in about eight years ago when we were sending maybe four or five to ten orders a day. So we used to fly under the radar. But no, it's, it's definitely parcel post.
Nathan Bush: I remember the same. I had a small running shorts startup and our biggest challenge used to be can we get two pairs of shorts through as a male parcel? And that would have been like a challenge every time. It was just. Yep. That was about trying to crack the code. Exactly. Now you mentioned before that Budgie Smuggler is made in Sydney. Still the case.
Brendan Hartman: Yep, absolutely.
Nathan Bush: And absolutely the reason for that.
Nathan Bush: Obviously you could get them made a lot cheaper elsewhere, but you've stuck with Sydney.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah. So, I mean, part of it is we just like making stuff as a brand. Adam. Adam's always spoken about it. He just enjoys making things. So it extends all the way back to the boys that did found the business and that's just how they did it. Adam, obviously the next in line and just wanted to continue it. He just enjoyed making things. He can go, we can go out to the factory. We can see things getting made. We've got now. So we've been with the same supplier for 14, 15 years, I think probably longer. And if anything ever does go wrong, which is rare, where it's a. We can just drive over the bridge. It's over in Marrickville, St. Peter's area. There's big industrial area where a lot of this stuff actually happens. We drive over, show in person and say, hey, what happened? And then they're like, oh, I know exactly what happened. And often the time they can just fix it. Whereas, you know, good luck doing that if you're making them overseas, for starters. It also limits the sort of. I mean, it's preparing for the worst, which sometimes you need to be prepared For. But I mean, we're not restricted or locked into huge minimum order quantities. So if we're ordering, we could order a couple of hundred units at a time. And that almost limits the damage. If there was to be any. It's a few hundred units as opposed to a few thousand. You'd have to commit to overseas turnarounds. Another one, like, by the time, you know, you order something from overseas, it could be sort of six to 12 weeks, depending on where you order from. And then also add on the shipping sort of time and that sort of stuff. Our turnaround for our own stock, we've got that in a slower. We'll call it the slow lane. It's less urgent. We've got that coming through at about five or six weeks at the moment. And that's big, big stock orders coming into summer. And then we do custom swimwear for people as well. So bucks, parties, birthdays, footy teams, surf club, schools. Any fucking weddings. I mentioned weddings. We turned those around in about three weeks. So it's just opened the doors to so many things. And I mean, I mentioned we've been with the same sort of providers or suppliers for a number of years. The costs have actually come down relatively to a similar price to what you would bank overseas for. And then, you know, that difference in cost you just put down to less headaches.
Nathan Bush: It's so worth it. Especially now if you haven't got container ships that are stuck in the middle of the ocean coming to Christmas.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, and that's exactly the cost. We pay for. We pay for peace of mind. We pay for quality. It's basically guaranteed quality. So we're happy we've stayed here.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. So good. How did the guys originally come across that partner 14 years ago and how they managed to scale with you in that time.
Brendan Hartman: Good question. So we used to make pairs just from an old, like a nylon Lycra sort of style swimwear. The basic stuff you'd see at the beach 20 years ago, we'd stick a logo onto the back and the logo might come off eventually.
Nathan Bush: Better than texture on the back of some rebel swimmers.
Brendan Hartman: Exactly. So it had come a long way, even since then, but now it's the sublimated printing. So you'll print your pears on a. On a white bit of fabric and they'll get cut out and whatnot. We've been with them for a long time and their capacity is huge. They can do whatever we give them. They're fine. We are now their biggest customer. So it's obviously started as the smallest, now we're the biggest. And then in terms of the makers and manufacturers, because they're all small businesses themselves, they're still on board from the start, but now we have sort of five or six different ones who have varying capacities and their expertise ranges across swimwear and different types of materials and whatnot. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily the manufacturers that have scaled. We've just scaled around them.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, brilliant.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: And I love that you still really push your custom range. You talked about some of those situations before on the website. You've got, if you can imagine it, we can make it for you. Which I could imagine is a pretty dangerous statement at times.
Brendan Hartman: It is. Particularly around Bucks parties. They like some. There's been some rogue, some really rogue images that will never be spoken of.
Nathan Bush: Where's the line that you go, we can't make them.
Brendan Hartman: It's kind, it's one of those ones where you kind of look at it and be like, how many people would be upset by this? Like, that's kind of. It's no, there's no like objective sort of measurement. It's definitely subjective, but it's kind of like this is probably going to annoy a few people. We probably shouldn't do this.
Nathan Bush: Well, especially because they've still got the big Budgie Smuggler logo on the back, don't they?
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, they do, they do. I mean, they can choose to remove that if they choose so. But yeah, if it's got our logo on it, we've still got some people to keep happy. And that being our customers, we don't really want families and whatnot seeing these things when they've bought pairs for their kids. So there is a line. There is a line. It's kind of like, we'll call it like, it's almost like the funny uncle. Like the funny uncle can get away with a few things and still be happy with the kids.
Nathan Bush: Yes, that's also. I love that analogy. So can you, can you talk us through the process? You mentioned three weeks turnaround from order on those custom ones through to fulfillment. Can you talk us through? Like, let's. Can we nerd out a little bit on that? Like, what's the kind of software, the design process, how does it get approved, all that sort of stuff.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, so I love this kind of stuff. It's all like just the way my brain works. Goes from A to Z. So we have three full time graphic designers, two here in Sydney, one is in London. We have a Small office in London. Now, they basically punch away on Illustrator whatever sort of design ideas get thrown at them. A lot of the time it's just. A lot of the time it's footy clubs or surf clubs or schools. And they'll say, here are our colors. Make us something. So they also.
Nathan Bush: Customers aren't actually giving you the design and saying, is exactly what I want.
Brendan Hartman: It's a mix of both. It's a mix of about 50. 50, and actually I'll say 60. 40.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brendan Hartman: And there's also a small percentage that slides in there that literally sends you something they've designed themselves and say, I want this exactly these colors. Xyz. So they'll punch away on Illustrator every so often. Most of the time, they'll get full creative freedom. They say, here's the colors. Make me something cool. And they'll just nerd out and make something wild. Other times, they'll get given what they need and they'll just put it onto a template. Say, here you go.
Nathan Bush: Press print.
Brendan Hartman: That goes those files. Get over to our printers over in Marrickville. It rolls through the printers. It rolls with the heat press. That whole sublimated software rolls through it like 200 and 230 degrees or something like that through the heat press turns the ink from the paper into gas that sets in the fabric. It's amazing. And so that now that that design or those colors will literally last fabric, which is amazing. So in terms of quality, that's. That's the kind of stuff we go for. We have a laser cutting machine. We actually have three of them now that do our placement cuts. So they'll literally just roll a piece of fabric through, goes through them. Almost like a conveyor belt style. Bigger, bigger version of what you use at checkout at Woolies. They'll roll through. Laser machine will literally trace around the outside of the pears. We've got Wayne at the other end. He just picks it off, separates it to five or six of the makers, depending on what the order is and what the garments are. And yes, basically three weeks later, we pick them up from our. From one of the factories in Marrickville, bring it back here, send them out.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful.
Brendan Hartman: It's really cool. It's cool process. Like, it's. It is awesome to watch. And one thing I'd love to sort of implement is a way that kind of like the whole. I think it's Domino's with their pizza tracker. I'd love to be able to pull out some sort of service like that where customers can Just click and say, hey, where's my order? And it's like there's a little video of them getting cut or, like, getting printed. So, yeah, it is really cool to watch. I love going out there and checking it out.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. I can imagine you get a huge amount of shareability from those.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah. People. People love when their custom stuff arrives. I mean, we've got some nice boxes we send them out in. There's usually our designers who looked after each of the orders. They'll include like a little note saying, you know, I'm glad you went with pink and not blue or some sort of. Some sort of nice thing that. Again, to show that it's not just a picking slip thrown, like. Yeah, there's some good stuff that pops up online when people receive these things.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. Now, you're obviously famous here in Australia and around the world now for the briefs and you've expanded into other areas, including women's, as you talked about. And, you know, you've got accessories on there like face masks and towels and all that sort of stuff. Has that been a challenge? Because you are so well known for Budgie Smuggler to expand beyond the brief.
Brendan Hartman: Sometimes. Sometimes. A lot of the time. So women swimwear, for example, that came about from purely demand. So what we found online was it was literally 50, 50 in terms of men and women ordering. On our website at the time, we only had men's swimwear. So sisters, mothers, girlfriends, wives, partners, whoever they were coming to the website and buying for the men in their lives, they eventually spoke up and kind of had a few emails here and there saying, you should do women's swimwear. So we did.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
Brendan Hartman: And that's basically how a lot of our products have evolved. We don't know, we don't listen to every customer. A lot of them, some customers try and tell us we should make board shorts, which is just not going to happen. Yeah, that's blasphemy. But, yeah, I mean, a lot of the time we just listen to what people want and they say, oh, you should make a one piece for racing. So we have two of those, you know, like, oh, want something more flattering? We should make a one piece that I can just walk around the beach in. So we made one of them and it sort of goes. Goes around about that way. Obviously, face masks, mid-2020 were a damn necessity. So we wanted to have our own face masks. Didn't want to wear ones that were given to us or had to keep buying them. So we just decided to make them ourselves. So, yeah, a lot of things have come from necessity and just pure demand.
Nathan Bush: And I suppose having that flexibility of onshore manufacturing and design helps with that,
Brendan Hartman: honestly, makes things so much easier. It's, you know, like I said, we've got our designers here on hand that can just punch stuff through. An illustrator. We've got some great pattern makers that we've used over the years that are awesome. They're all. And again, they're all out in that sort of maracil, St. Peter's sort of industrial area. Yeah, there's. There's some great people that are there that really know what they're doing. We kind of give them the brief and say, eg, we want a face mask or we want activewear shorts or, you know, this, that, whatever. They'll come back and say, try this out. We'll go through sampling. Thankfully, sampling is only like a couple of weeks. Again, we'll sample it in a few different kind of fabrics. Like it. The ease and flexibility.
Nathan Bush: Who has to sample the briefs for everyone? Wow.
Brendan Hartman: Thankfully, that was done years ago. Yeah. I mean, now it's just kind of saying that. Making sure that certain designs aren't sitting in funny places because, I mean, there are some damn aggressive designs on the website, but the less. The more subtle designs, the better. We don't need to draw attention to everywhere.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. What's the biggest challenge keeping you up at night, then?
Brendan Hartman: Good question. Sometimes I don't know. We are still very much a small business, so there is a lot of crossover between people and roles and. And whatnot. Our biggest. It's not so much a challenge, it's something we focus on a lot is. We'll call it a challenge. Our biggest challenge is just trying to get the right people here and the right people to stay. I mean, without great people who have a genuine love for what we're doing, we wouldn't be able to do what we do. We wouldn't be able to grow. We wouldn't be able to have fun while doing it. Like, one thing we're really keen on is just to create a workplace that people want to come to. And it's kind of when we. If we fail at that, then we will probably fail as a business. Just with the way things are going, we really just want to create a place where people want to come to work. So that's. That's kind of something that's always on our mind. It's like, you know, what can we add or what can we do next? Or, you know, how's so and so going? And it's like we're very personable sort of company, so I wouldn't say it's a challenge. It's just something that we're constantly sort of driving towards and the rest will look after itself. If people want to come to work, they're going to want to do well, so.
Nathan Bush: Oh, it's music to my ears.
Brendan Hartman: I mean I enjoy it as well. Like that's, that's also a big, a big thing. I love coming to work.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
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Nathan Bush: What makes a great budgie smuggler person?
Brendan Hartman: Our biggest one here is we like to have a good time, we have a laugh but we still get shit done. That is the textbook example of someone that works here. They're usually quite light hearted. We've got a small team so they obviously need to get along with people. People's a big one. How you interact with other people can really affect others days and whether they enjoy coming to work. So they're kind of big ones. It's more the type of person in specific skill related jobs. For example, you know, graphic design or accounting, you know, they're very specific. They need to be, they need to be on. But for a lot of other things you can generally, generally teach the skills required. It's very hard to teach or change a person if necessary. So yeah, we do really focus on
Nathan Bush: the type of person that's cool. And with soft skills being such a focus and culture fit being a focus, is there anything that you do in the interview process or the recruitment process that makes them stand out as a good fit?
Brendan Hartman: More recently than not, we put out a job. I was probably 12, little over 12 months ago, we put out a job and included a little snippet down the bottom saying creative applications encouraged or something like that. And we had a few people sending videos.
Nathan Bush: Oh nice.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah. Which was awesome. Like, I mean that just makes my job much easier. Watch a video on someone and you kind of Get a vibe for what they're like. Even if they're acting, they've at least gone to the effort, which is out of the box, which is kind of what we are. Sorry, outside the box. One of those people who sent a video was hired. He's here. But the interview process is usually not coming into the office. It's usually we'll meet them out in public and go to a coffee shop or something, somewhere quite casual, and we'll just chat. Not a lot of it is spent. Not a lot of the time is spent on what they've done in their work life. A lot of it, a large portion of it is spent on what they've done outside of their work life. And obviously, we'll touch on the necessities of skills and, you know, what you bring to the job and that kind of stuff. But it's more about how they engage with people. You know, where do they grow up and, you know, how do they still talk to their school friends? And, like, there's a few little bits and pieces in there that you can kind of pick up that, like, oh, this person, you know, really great communicator and that kind of stuff. So it's very informal, but there's. There is method to the madness.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. It's funny, though, after time, isn't it? Like you mentioned there around, do you still speak to your school friends? You find the questions that really hit a mark, even if they're kind of left field for the job?
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you don't want to ask the usual ones because there's usually some sort of prepared answer that comes with it. You know, what are your weaknesses? And that kind of stuff.
Nathan Bush: It's like, I'll turn them into positives.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. My weakness is that I work too hard. It's like, all right. No, it's like, again, it comes. I mean, it keeps me back to it. It just comes back to like, we want to show that we're real people and we want to. We want to interview real people. We want to hear when I hire real people. Like, so, I mean, that's kind of what we look for when we're. When we go through that sort of job interview process.
Nathan Bush: I love that approach. And I mean, we're seeing it as well as, like, before maybe even three years ago, we were still getting questions of do put my photo on my resume? And now it's like, can I give you a TikTok video to upload? Or it's like, yeah, I'll Try and give my as much of myself as I can up front so that we know for a good fit for each other before we waste a couple of meetings.
Brendan Hartman: Absolutely. I mean, we've got people sending us Budgie photos as part of their resume. It's awesome. Again, part of the job is to prove or show in some way that you already love the brand. It's not just like, I need this job because, again, we need people here that do love the brand.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. I could imagine if you had jobs that you thought your customer base could fill, you'd have customers jumping over as quickly as possible, right?
Brendan Hartman: Absolutely.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Cool. Now, the other thing that I wanted to explore with you quickly was partnerships. You guys have done a phenomenal job in partnerships. Like, literally before we came on this call, I was having a flick through Instagram and I saw Conrad Harrell from the Warriors. I don't know, he's retired now, isn't he?
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, he's playing over and I think he's with Leeds, maybe one of the other UK clubs.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brendan Hartman: But, yeah, he's over and he's over in the UK playing.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And he was on Insta. His wife was in her Budgie Smuggler and they were around the pool and he was tagging you and, like, having a conversation around it. It was like. It was awesome, but it felt so natural.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, there's some good. There's some really good people that have popped up over the years. And I mean, there's. We're kind of getting more and more as we kind of get bigger, which is awesome. But a lot of the people you see floating around have been either fans of Budgie or have been involved with Budgie before. When we were quite small. A lot of the brand was built off sports people just from our own. So Adam. Adam, myself, we're five years apart, so we've kind of got different year groups from school and whatnot and heavily involved in rugby when we were kids and sort of early adults, and a handful of those have gone into professional sort of circles. So we kind of had our own mates to sort of lean on for a bit. And that kind of was a great sort of catalyst to get into those sporting circles. But, I mean, partnerships are great fun there. And again, like, it's. We never really go down the route of just slapping a logo on something and saying, there you go, there's. There's a partnership done.
Nathan Bush: It's.
Brendan Hartman: It's got to. It's got to be reciprocal. It's gotta be something fun. It's gotta be Something remarkable, like something that someone would want to make a comment about. Whether good or bad, they're the kind of stuff that we go for. So Conrad Harrell is an iconic, iconic human being, let alone rugby player or rugby league player. So, I mean, he fits the mold perfectly. He's not. He won't mind me saying this. I'm sure he's not ripped. He's just an athlete. What he does on the field is incredible and his humor off the field is just so funny. He fits the mould perfectly. The type of people we go for, the type of people we really love being associated with. Budgie is kind of like the people that lead the team song. It's the cultural or spiritual leader of the team. It's not necessarily. It could be the captain and it could be the most ripped dude in there. That's also fine. But it's the dude that the team gets around to be like, this guy is a legend. And they're the type of people we've always focused on. So thankfully, the sort of personal and athlete partnerships have come off the back of that.
Nathan Bush: How good. And you mentioned there that some of those came about organically. Do you have a hit list of those kind of legends that you go after to try and bring on board?
Brendan Hartman: Yes and no. I mean, we don't do. It sounds very convenient, but we don't do a lot of reaching out every so often. We will if there's. If there's one that sort of pops up and we go, oh, that. That guy or that girl would be awesome. In a Budgie campaign of some description. But a lot of them have just sort of come about. They've been long term, sort of growing. It's like you pick up on things on our socials and stuff. You're like, oh, there's. There's so and so. That's been wearing them for a couple of seasons now. You know, he seems like a good dude and you kind of pay more attention. It's. There's never really been something that we wake up, there's something in the paper on Sunday morning or Saturday morning or whatever, and we go, oh, let's get that person. It's more like the gradual. Like you pick up on it. Like I said, pick up on it on the socials, like, so and so will tag you in something. You're like, huh, it's the third time they've done that this season. That's pretty cool. Like, pretty cool that they're doing that, like, off their own bat. So again, they're the kind of people, because if they don't already love the brand, they're not going to love the partnership. So they're the kind of people that we go after as well.
Nathan Bush: And the partnerships monetary or are they product based or are they kind of referral based? How do you like to structure them?
Brendan Hartman: There's a mix. There's a whole mix. And again, it depends. Depends on a number of things. Like, you know, selfishly, it kind of depends on like their reach and audience as well, but on a bigger sort of measurement. It's whether they want to do it or not. A lot of the time, if we don't need too much out of them, it's just product based. They'll just need some stuff for training or for recovery or whatnot. Yeah, but you know, there's been a few in the past, like Connie had some pairs online where he designed his own pairs. We sort of turned him into a bit of a cartoon.
Nathan Bush: And I was about to say they wouldn't be boring.
Brendan Hartman: No, no, no, no, no, no. And so he, he would receive like a royalty fee out of that, just like any artist or designer or whatnot would. So that's kind of how they're structured.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Cool. I saw the ones that you did for Josh Papa Lee after he got, after he ankle tapped at the Gold Coast Titans game.
Brendan Hartman: I was literally Jamal Fogarty.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's right. Fogarty, who we just signed. I was literally just. I was in the crowd behind the goalpost towards where they were running. It was the best moment ever.
Brendan Hartman: That's epic. So Adam, I'm Lynn for owner of Budgie. He's a mad Raiders fan. Yeah, I think, I think maybe, you know, he grew up in Cameltown or born in Cameltown, but one of his first NRL games he saw as a kid was the Raiders and he's just been fixed on him since. For his, for his 30th birthday, we organized the Canberra Raiders to sign just a green pair of budgies for him which we got framed or whatever. So Jared Croker organized that. So absolute legend. But yeah, I mean being able to do something like that. This all ties back to like we wouldn't be able to do that if we didn't have our graphic designers that are amazing and we wouldn't be able to make them so quick if we didn't produce in Australia and like all these sorts of things like just enable us to be bank. All right, let's do this. Like, so we, we actually didn't sell them. We only sold. We only Sorry, we only made them and gave them to the team. Gave a few extra pairs to Josh to hand out to the family as well. We actually had. It's quite funny. I think it was in an article recently, Jamal Fogarty, his missus reached out and she said, oh my God, I saw this, I need to make some for him and gave us his size. So we sent them to him and he wears them. I mean, he mentioned it in that article, but. Yeah, so funny.
Nathan Bush: Wouldn't that be it? Wouldn't that be a side of rocking up to your brand new team with everyone wearing Speedos with you getting run down by.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, so good.
Nathan Bush: Awesome.
Nathan Bush: Now we're going to let you go. But the one thing I did want
Nathan Bush: to just touch on was that you guys seem to support a lot of mental health organizations, including Waves of Wellness and Gotcha for Life.
Nathan Bush: Is it mental health that you're particularly
Nathan Bush: interested in supporting or are they just some of the organisations?
Brendan Hartman: They're a big piece of the organisations. We don't support too many outside of the mental health space. Not that we don't want to either. I mean, people reach out all the time and, you know, unfortunately we can't say yes to all of them, otherwise we'd go broke as well. But, you know, we kind of took a stand or took a direction of the business that like we have a really young team. So, I mean, I'm 31 and one of the oldest here. There's, you know, our youngest is 17 maybe, including our casual staff. So, like we've got a young crew and like this, this sort of generation at the moment, they're now forming as the most prevalent with mental health conditions and we just want to do something that can help our own people and our own sort of generation. Not, not to sort of discount any other charities and causes out there, but this is the one that was most close to us and something that we thought we could contribute well to. So there's waves of wellness, there's one way of got you for life. We've made some pairs for living. They're up the coast a bit, so there's a few that pop up the soldier on as well. So there's a few that pop up from time to time and yeah, we like to get around them if we can.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. It reminds me a lot of what the guys at Trademutt are doing.
Brendan Hartman: Trademark. Yeah, the bright sort of tradie shirts.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or similar sort of personality and cause and reason why they're doing it. So that's brilliant to hear. Now, Brendan, what is next on the radar for yourselves and the team at Budgie Smuggler? Must call it a trademark.
Brendan Hartman: Yeah, good question. So we've only just moved to this space. I mean at the moment it's big warehouse kind of thing. We only just left the original apartment we were operating from. What are we in? In October. So that would have been three, four, five months ago. We just left. So we've just moved to this space. We've got another one coming up next year that we'll move to. It's. We've almost outgrown this one already, which is, gee, it's a problem, but it's a great problem to have.
Nathan Bush: Is that from a team perspective or from an inventory perspective?
Brendan Hartman: Inventory. Inventory. The team we've got at the moment, we've got about 11 full time staff. So we definitely won't outgrow a biggish office space anytime soon. And we want to keep our team sort of quite small and niche because we kind of just get a vibe that you can probably achieve more with much less and it sort of keeps everyone busy as well. But what's next? So we have an operation over in the UK that we're focusing on growing at the moment. Big sporting and rugby sort of focus over there. So many rugby teams. So many. So custom swimwear is a big thing for us over on that side of the world and also being on the doorstep to Europe as well. So the main reason we did that was so people over that side could get their budgies quicker. They can basically get it overnight from London, which is awesome. Yeah, the French really get around it as well. So that's probably our third sort of setup. And then where we go from there, we're not. Not too sure. We kind of just follow the data through our website. So at the moment the US is kind of battling it out with some spots in Asia. So cool. We'll keep an eye on it. But yeah, we'll focus on Australia and the UK for now.
Nathan Bush: And are you shipping over there or is that based on traffic and engagement?
Brendan Hartman: Both. All of the above. All of the above. So we kind of just followed where the orders were coming from.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brendan Hartman: And sort of solving some, solving some problems along the way being, you know, shipping time and cost. They were both to sort of detractors from ordering for the uk. So we set up distribution on that side. So both of those were solved immediately.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Brilliant, mate. Thank you for sharing everything that you've shared today. I love hearing this story and I think there's so much exciting stuff going on there. If people are interested and they want to get in touch, check out Budgie Smuggler or get in touch with yourself. What's the best way to do that?
Brendan Hartman: Find our socials. I mean, we're on them all the time. Budgie udgiesmuggle Smugglets for the women's pages. They're the two main ones. But yeah, any of the emails? Again, like I said, we're really small team, so a lot of the time when an email comes through the general inquiries, our whole office usually hears about it. So you'll find someone's ears.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. Thanks Brandon. Awesome.
Brendan Hartman: Thank you.
Nathan Bush: Now if that has not inspired you to get into your budgies this summer, I don't know what will help you. Thanks for To Brendan for giving us the insight into the iconic Budgie Smuggler brand. Here are my three practical takeaways from the episode Number one the power of local manufacturing. We heard here that Budgie Smuggler have been with the same Sydney supplier for 14 years. Rather than save a few dollars by having them manufactured overseas, they've stayed local to guarantee quality, fix problems quickly, reduce minimum quantities, create quicker turnarounds, and allow new features like custom creation. And with Brendan saying that it ends up a similar cost to overseas production, that local manufacturing creates a pretty powerful competitive advantage. Number two Be real. One of Brendan's biggest points was to show that there's a real person behind the scenes and behind the brand of Budgie Smuggler. Whether this is at the end of a phone, handwritten notes in orders, or real customers as influencers, this is what creates the brand. It also develops empathy and goodwill with your customers, which you might need to cash on in at some points if things get bumpy.
Brendan Hartman: 3.
Nathan Bush: Creative applications encouraged if you value soft skills in your organization and your culture, you need to give people a chance
Nathan Bush: to be themselves in the recruitment process.
Nathan Bush: Whether this be a coffee chat rather than an official interview, or a creative video rather than a resume, the more human you can make the recruitment process, the better likelihood is that you'll have a great fit. To finish up. I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time, first time listener of Add to Cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over 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 econ commerce case studies, tools and research, sign up to the High Five 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 12high12h I g h.com au forward/high5 and the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce ecommerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com 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
Nathan Bush: to discuss your next move.
Nathan Bush: Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to CART
Nathan Bush: sa.
[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 to through your Friday.
