Oh Mabel, an organic bed linen brand and online shop, is run by Sarah Power in Canberra.
Established in 2011, Power aimed to start an online bed linen shop that would stock other brands of linens. When she found that other brands just weren’t up to her standards, she created her own line and hasn’t looked back since.
While the shop is on hiatus at the moment, it will be back up and running soon with a new line of Oh Mabel bed linens.
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Australian Mike Langford quit his IT job and started selling animal onesies online and has never been happier.
For the uninitiated, a onesie is a full body pajama (think what babies often wear) and an animal onesie is a onesie with an animal theme to it (why should babies have all the dress up fun?) By the way, these oneseies are for adults.
Langford started his site www.animalsuits.com.au in July 2012 using WooCommerce and it is now his full-time endeavor.
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Online clothing swapping site 99Dresses, founded by Nikki Durkin from New South Wales in 2010, has been growing since the day it launched.
The young entrepreneur said that it was a tough go launching the site, but once she got it up and running, she valued the experience and learned a lot from it.
“The most challenging thing is figuring out you’re going to run out of money before you’re going to take off. It’s frustrating; it’s a tough feeling. You feel like you’re drowning a bit, but I got very lucky,” Durkin says.
That luck was in the form of her decision to enter a $10,000 business competition, which she won, followed by her admission to Y Combinator — an organisation that provides seed funding to a select number of start-ups.
Pamper Hamper Gifts, which won an Australian Small Business National Winner award in 2012, was established way back in 2004 by Bianca Kristallis.
Based in Sydney, Kristallis had the vision for her business after seeing that hampers were hampered by an inherent tackiness. Believing she could do better and bring the ‘wow factor’ back to hamper gifts, and Pamper Hamper Gifts was born and is still going strong today and winning business awards along the way.
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Online crowd sourcing site Kickstarter has announced that it will open up to Australian and New Zealand projects in the near future.
Kickstarter is hosting sessions in Sydney and Melbourne this month for people who have project ideas.
Founded in 2009, Kickstarter allows people to pitch their ideas to the general public to solicit funding for their ideas to get made. Movies, video games, gadgets and music has all been funded through the U.S.-based site.
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Online store Wired and Wonderful, run by Christina Cridland in Perth, imports handmade African gifts, homewares and jewellery.
Established in 2011 after Cridland felt unsatisfied by her career as a journalist, the store has allowed her to spend more time at home with her young son.
Prior to starting her importing, Cridland visited the shop she was doing business with to ensure it was a fair trade workplace.
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Naomi Simson, founder of online gift retailer RedBalloon, says people wanting to start their own business should be detailed and visionaries.
“I usually defer to businessman and entrepreneur Jack Cowin who puts it better than I ever could,” Simson says. “I saw Jack present at the EY Entrepreneurs workshop, where he opened with the quote ‘an entrepreneur needs to be a cross between a microbiologist and an astronomer’. He believes that true entrepreneurs are special in that they can be both detailed and visionary.”
Simson says great entrepreneurs are curious, persistent, are searching for better ways to do things, endlessly positive, focused and have exemplary people skills. While entrepreneurs can be born with these traits, she says some can also be learned.
“Curiosity and positivity are hard things to teach — you either have them or you don’t,” she says. “But characteristics like focus and persistence can be learned, and need to be — without them you’re unlikely to make it as an entrepreneur or business owner.”
Simson attributes the success of her own business to tenacity and hard work. “It was almost three months before RedBalloon made its first sale,” she says. “People used to ask me ‘when were you going to give up?’ but the thought never crossed my mind. I never, ever thought that it would not work and I never contemplated throwing in the towel.”
Australian businesses, much like the rest of the world, have found that outsourcing many activities that can be done online is turning out to be quite lucrative for business.
Global freelancing company oDesk says Australian enterprises are increasingly outsourcing tasks online as the company passes $US1 billion worth of projects.
Matt Cooper, vice president of enterprise and international at oDesk, told StartupSmart blog that passing the project work milestone is a sign that outsourcing work online has entered the mainstream.
“It’s a big thing for us to break that one billion barrier milestone, but the bigger story is that online work is officially out of beta,” Cooper says. “It’s very early still, but it’s a nice recognition that this is really starting to break into the mainstream.”
The figures released by oDesk show Australians have been outsourcing both technical and non-technical tasks over the last two years.
“This is driven by the huge demand for technical talent. I’m in San Francisco but everywhere you go you see articles about the Australian tech talent shortage,” Cooper says.
Outsourcing growth by the numbers:
“The growth in Australians outsourcing legal was an interesting one for us,” Cooper says. “As more and more companies look to grow internationally, they need legal support and talent in a range of countries.”
Cooper says the growth across non-technical tasks in Australia is part of a worldwide trend.
“It’s indicative of a broader trend that online work is no longer tech. When you look at our business in 2008 and 2009, it was almost entirely technical work, but we’ve seen rapid expansion into legal, finance, writing and translations,” Cooper says.
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Perth, Western Australia’s Natalie Long spent years in the fashion industry before setting off in a new direction and creating her own homewares brand and online store Bowerhouse.
She designs her own homewares for Bowerhouse, which has been in operation since 2012.
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