Videos

Video: A title appears on an off-white screen. It reads: “Knobby: Developing an eCommerce strategy that suits your business”.  A man is interviewed in a large office with wall murals and mannequins wearing colourful underwear. People work at desks and behind him.
Text: Rob Rand, Founder of KNOBBY
ROB: The reason we chose a subscription model over a traditional eCommerce store is for a few reasons. First of all, it allows us to create more of an experience, having that monthly edition of underwear where the customer doesn’t necessarily know what they’re going to get. Whereas if it was a standard eCommerce store, sure, they’re going to know exactly what they want and what they’re going to be purchasing, but it kind of takes a bit of the fun factor out of it. It’s not like your traditional eCommerce store where you sell out – we have to have that pair of Knobby’s in that size for that customer in six months’ time. So, it’s incredibly challenging, but, you know what, it’s part of the fun. We don’t send out all of our orders in the one go like a lot of other subscription companies do. We spread out across the whole month and it’s unique to an anniversary date for each member. Bascially, when they first subscribe, that’s their anniversary date for the following months. The advantage of this, first of all, is the customer gets to receive their order within a few days after they’ve placed it – which is how it should be. It also spreads the load across the whole month for our packing team. Each day we have a pick-up service. Using Australia Post, it’s amazing that we’re able to get this product from here on the Sunshine Coast to these most remote corners of Australia we didn’t even know existed.
Video: The Australia Post logo appears on a white screen.
Text: auspost.com.au/smallbusiness

Video: A title appears on an off-white screen. It reads: “Knobby: Designing a unique brand experience”
Video: A woman is interviewed in an office space with large windows and mannequins wearing colourful underwear behind her.
Text: Ash Rand, Director of KNOBBY
Audio: "So, I do a lot of the copywriting, which is the part that I find the most fun. At the start we did approach it with a real cheeky, Aussie, colloquial vibe and it was just a lot of fun to do. We were worried, I was worried, when we launched the women’s line that we might have to lose that tone a little bit, but we retained it and I think it’s what works really well and our customers really resonate with our tone."
Audio: "A big focus of what we do is, we call it the ‘Knobby experience’ - so we’re not just about sending out a pair of underwear. Everything has been meticulously designed and crafted; from the package that arrives, the way its opened, the messaging that is written on the box as you open it, the layers of packaging within that, until you finally open up your underwear which is a surprise design – people love that."
Video: The Australia Post logo appears on a white screen.
Text: auspost.com.au/smallbusiness

Video: A title appears on an off-white screen. It reads: “Knobby: Designing a unique brand experience”
Video: A man is interviewed in a large office with wall murals and mannequins wearing colourful underwear. People work at desks and behind him.
Text: Rob Rand, Founder of KNOBBY
Audio: "We’re a very colloquial, Aussie, just a fun, witty brand, really. Which resonates well with our Australian audience, we’ve never actually targeted any specific audiences internationally – that’s just all been through organic growth.
Audio: "The whole Aussie side… look, sure, it doesn’t connect with everyone overseas, but I think the most important thing is we stay true to who we are. There has been a couple of times on this journey where we’ve tried to steer the brand off in another direction, kind of thinking that that’s what we’re supposed to do. You know, that’s what other brands out there are doing and that’s just the way you’re supposed to do this – but we’re just a fun Aussie brand, and let’s just keep it that way.
And if that’s going to connect with an international audience, then awesome. And it is – they love it."
But, when there does come a time when you do want to go international, one of the biggest challenges we’ve had when dealing on an international level would be customs. Values of product when they start being charged duty… what’s helped us in this case is having that support from Australian Post. So, we’ve had to change our packaging slightly for an international market, depending on the country.
I’d always suggest just, you, know, really picking one country at a time and focussing on that first – don’t try and just go all over the world because you’ll probably get a lot of product coming back and end up costing more in the long-run."
Video: The Australia Post logo appears on a white screen.
Text: auspost.com.au/smallbusiness

Video: A title appears on an off-white screen. It reads: “Knobby: Designing a unique brand experience”
Video: A man is interviewed in a large office with wall murals and mannequins wearing colourful underwear. People work at desks and behind him.
Text: Rob Rand, Founder of KNOBBY
Audio: "We have a really diverse team, we have a fairly young team as well who all bring a certain dynamic. They’re really a great reflection of the culture we try and instil here.
First of all, we need to get orders out, so that’s obviously our dispatch department – they’re the guys who are always working, you know, full-on trying to get orders out all day every day. And then we also have our customer service team. Ever since day one of this, you know, I really wanted to create as a part of the experience just a brilliant customer support. You know, how I wanted to be treated when I bought a product or had dealings with another company. That’s really all it was and it’s a pretty simple concept.
In house designers and copywriters – that goes off more into our web-team, which is our front-end developer, a software engineer who works with our back-bone system.
But overall, it’s just about creating a really nice team that just understands the vision. I feel like everyone we have at Knobby doesn’t really feel like they’re doing a job – you’re kind of just back at school again."  
Video: The Australia Post logo appears on a white screen.
Text: auspost.com.au/smallbusiness 

Vision: The word 'Singapore' appears over gleaming skyscrapers. A curved framework of tubes and struts forms the shining metal shell of the Helix Bridge. A brunette gazes at the view from the bridge. She stands in a tropical garden.

Text: "Dawn Phua, 3000 Thieves Customer."

[Chic music plays throughout.]

Dawn: I found out about Australian coffee when I was holidaying in Australia last year. And I realised the coffee culture is actually really strong. When I came back from Australia, I was wondering where could I get a regular supply of beans. So I was actually browsing online and on social media and chanced upon Three Thousand Thieves.

Vision: A blonde man lets himself into a stylish warehouse space and makes filter coffee. Text: "Melbourne." The man stands near a work bench. Text: "Athan Didaskalou, Founder, 3000 Thieves."

Athan: So I think Melbourne's coffee scene has grown into this magnificent utopia of coffee. Melbourne's famous for it worldwide. We produce some amazing quality coffee. And it's not that we're growing any of it, it's that the people who are bringing it in and doing stuff with it actually are spending the time and committing to getting as much flavour out of the coffee as possible.

The moment I came up with Three Thousand Thieves, I was working for a coffee roaster in the suburbs, old Italian guy. He knew his stuff, but I wanted to experience more. The biggest turning point was realising that we are curators and that we actually curate an experience for people. We help them discover new things. And that shift in mentality from "We're just supplying them coffee," to "Actually, we're creating an experience for them," helped then open up new possibilities and new channels for distribution.

When we started to feel big is when we started to get a lot more international customers.

Vision: Dawn picks up a box and runs her thumb across a white and gold sticker. Split screens show Athan packing a box and Dawn examining a box's contents, which include a bag of coffee beans and a bundle of photos and leaflets.

Dawn: So when I received the first package, I thought it was beautifully done. It had a really nice sticker and that brought a smile to my face. And when I opened it, I was expecting, like, just a bag of coffee beans, but there were cards inside talking about the roasters and about the beans. So the whole experience of receiving the package is really different.

Athan: We try and include photography and stories that are more than just about the beans, that are actually about the people behind the coffee as well. And that's a big part of what we do. And I think people relate to people more than they relate to the actual coffee itself. And I feel like that's quite nice. It's that connection, that human story, that people bond to.

Dawn: When I drink the coffee, I can actually make reference to the cards and enjoy the coffee the way that they recommend it.

Vision: Athan carefully places a bag of beans into a box, then smooths down the white and gold sticker. Athan and Dawn drink coffee.

Athan: We give them something, they give us something back and it's a great community vibe. I think the biggest... My biggest advice I can give to anybody looking to grow is to focus on community. Anybody can sell a product, but not everybody can build a community around the product and the service that you provide. And that's what's going to help grow to new local markets, to bigger international markets, and to other different products and services as well. Your community is essentially what you're building, not the business, per se.

Dawn: It just reminds me of the fun times that I had in Australia, meeting new people and just enjoying a cup of coffee.

Vision: On a Three Thousand Thieves label, '3TT' appears in a black circle. The red Australia Post logo appears on a white screen.

Text: "auspost.com.au/smallbusiness".
 

bellabox captions

[backing music plays throughout]

Vision: Shot of a city scape

Title: The bellabox story

Vision: Sarah walks through her office

Sarah: In terms of the spark, the spark to run a business it, was something we’d talked about- that idea- I was getting to a point in my career where I was helping run businesses so it felt like a natural step, how do I take the next leap? And the spark, was small but it moved very quickly.

Vision: Sarah being interviewed in her office.

Sarah: I think that women everywhere love beauty. I love beauty because there’s something about being female where it’s exciting to have all these beautiful products to trial so that drove me to look at different businesses that focused on that beauty arena.

Vision: Products being packed into a bellabox.

Sarah: Bellabox is a monthly beauty subscription service and there are five beauty products in a bellabox each month. They’re customised to your beauty profile, so when you join you say, oh I’ve got blond hair and I like red lipstick, and we make sure that we get products that suit you

Vision: Different beauty products that might go into a bellabox.

Sarah: The whole point of a bellabox is we’re trying to take what is a very traditional marketing channel, which is sampling, and making it much more sophisticated by targeting those products to your needs and wants.

Vision: Sarah’s staff working at their computers in the office.

Sarah: I think it’s really interesting to think about when you transition to being a bigger business. It’s almost hard to track- you can track it in hindsight and say well that numbers were showing that we were heading there.

Vision: Staff working in the office and packing products into bellaboxes.

Sarah: For us it was really, you’re dealing so much with the day to day and satisfying and being able to service that growth that you often forget to step back and say, well done, we’ve made it to a “bigger business”, so I know when it was but I remember at the time not even thinking about it.

Vision: Sarah sitting at her laptop.

Sarah: My business partner is actually my twin sister with bellabox.

[sound of a Skype call connecting]

Vision: Sarah’s twin sister Emily appears on screen.

Sarah: Good morning, how are you?

Emily: Good, how are you?

Sarah: Good … thank you. What’s going on in Singapore?

Vision: Sarah talking to Emily in her office.

Sarah: We are super competitive, but the fact that we knew each other so well and the value that we would bring to a business, we were able to quickly decide to go into this together.

Emily: China is going to be such an important market for us, such huge potential and we have this connection with Australia, that’s what customers want.

Sarah: Yeah, look I think we’re really excited about the opportunity, it was the right approach to go with the Australian natural products, because that definitely seems to be where we are getting the traction.

Vision: Sarah working at her desk.

Sarah: Australia Post came to us with an opportunity for us to get into China, and it was one of those things, there was so much going on and I sort of let it go for… two months, and then once I had a chance to think about it, I thought, this is huge.

Vision: bellaboxes being stacked up.

Sarah: I looked into the numbers and I saw how many Chinese were buying Australian products, Australian skincare products and I thought about our business model and how we could apply that to China and we decided to almost pivot from our current model and we have now limited edition boxes that are running through the Tmall and JD.com store of Australia Post into China.

Vision: Staff packing bellaboxes.

Sarah: Great things definitely happen. I think it’s about you know, trying to stop and smell the roses, and I’ve been told that on many occasions.

Vision: Sarah being interviewed in her office.

Sarah: Growth is exciting, but it comes with a few challenges, and having people come and tell you their story, as a customer of yours, I think is extremely valuable.

Title: Australia Post StarTrack

Titles: Bike Bag Dude

[Backing music plays throughout]

Vision: Man (Kedan) at a sewing machine, measuring, cutting and sewing.

00:09 >> Kedan “Doing what I do- working from home and being able to survive in the industry that I love without having a boss, I can’t figure out how you could top it really.

00:24:00 [Title: The Bike Bag Dude]

Vision: Man (Kedan) sitting in workroom.

00:25:22 Kedan: My name is Kedan.

[Title: Kedan Griffen: Bike Bag Dude]

Vision: Mountain bikes with bike bags on them.

00:27:13 My company is Bike Bag Dude and I make ultralight bike packing equipment for people to do supported touring and racing… my life is pretty cool.

Vision: Kedan’s wife and baby son.

00:39:30 Cath is my wonderful wife. Cullen is my eight month old son. And I have two dogs, a chocolate lab named Cadbury and a German Shepherd named Kai.

Vision: Kedan and his two dogs play in the backyard.

00:51:00 Yeah, they’re my whole world!

Vision: The family play inside.

00:55:00 Bike Bag Dude started with people I knew going off to do races in America and they came over and I gave them a hand because they knew I could sew, from a past life.

Vision: Bikes being ridden in Alaska.

00:57:30 I gave them a hand with the bag and it worked and others spoke about it on Facebook and other people then said, oh can you make me one?

01:19:00 It really is a case of that’s how it started.

01:20:30 America is my biggest market. My most important client is Chain Reaction Cycles in Alaska. Couldn’t imagine that I was supplying a bike company in Alaska whose shop is 200 metres away from the head office of the biggest company in my industry.

01:36:00 Yeah it was a pretty proud moment.

Vision: Australia Post parcel being carried into Chain Reaction Cycles.

01:38:00 If it all keeps going the way it’s going, maybe in a few years time we can figure out a reason to get over there say say gidday .

Vision: Mountain bikes passing one another on the road.

01:43:00 Keeping the business running has been hard for the last twelve months, I wasn’t prepared for how much time I would lose with Cath due to the birth of our new child.

01:47:00 You don’t realise how much work she does until she’s not doing it

Vision: Kath and Cullen play together.

01: 56:00 When it’s been busy I’ve called on mates a few times to give me a hand a few times, it’s been fantastic to have that support around you. My mates have been fantastic.

Vision: Kedan’s friends at his house, wheeling their bikes around the back.

02:08 Social media, Facebook, Instagram, website, that’s the whole business.

Vision: Bike Bag Dude bag on a mountain bike.

02:17:00 Like the whole first page of Google is just stacked with positive reviews. That’s how customers now find me who aren’t linked to the bike community or people that I actually know.

Vision: Kedan and his friends cycle along the beach.

02:30:00 Being able to post anywhere on the planet is the answer to how your business grows.

Vision: Cath using the computer to schedule a delivery.

02:36:00 It’s pretty amazing, I’ve sent some stuff to some weird places where you have to go to a map and go what?! Bermuda? The other day, like where is Bermuda, can we send to Bermuda, yep no worries!

Vision: Kedan and friends return from their bike ride.

02:42:00 I don’t think it’s about making like a million dollars a year. My whole drive for the future is not having to work for anybody else. If I continue to do this and not work for somebody else, I’ll be happy.

Vision: A rider in Alaska rides through a mountain landscape.

03:03:00 [Title: stories.auspost.com.au]

Valerie: My name's Valerie Khoo, I'm author of 'Power Stories - The 8 Stories You Must Tell To Build An Epic Business'. And I'm also chief storyteller at the Australian Writers' Centre. A business story encapsulates what your business is all about, and an effective business story is one that tells what your business is about but also why you do what you do and how you deliver that to your customers.

Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Francis and I am the co-founder and director of Homecamp. Homecamp is an online store. We sell canvas bell tents and other quality products for the outdoors.

Kerry: My name's Kerry Pietrobon and my role is designer and creative director at Harlow. Harlow is a designer label made in Australia, for sizes 12 to 24. It's about fitting your inner rock-chick.

Valerie: Think about your passion story. Your passion is about why you do what you do. Why you wake up every day. And that is so important and I encourage you to think about it and to tell it.

Kerry: Your 'why' and 'what you're trying to do' is really where everything else comes from. It's like the heart of your business.

Valerie: Passion is infectious. It is palpable. And people really buy into that.

Stephanie: Working out why you exist, why you want to start a business, what you want to bring to the world, I think is really important. And once you've got that, everything else can flow on from there.

Kerry: It's helped us focus. It's helped us with branding, with storytelling. It's also helped us to take a few steps outside the normal box.

Valerie: It's so important for your product to have its own story as well. Because customers can often be inspired by the story behind the product.

Kerry: I think it's important for our products to have their own story. They're named after either rock titles, rock songs or rock lyrics. It adds to a connection that they're having and a feeling that they get from it. Not only does the clothing make them feel good, but they'll say, "Ooh, I'm wearing the Rebel Rebel jeans. Aren't I a rebel today?!"

Stephanie: Camping can be a scary proposition for some people. They probably need some help from people like us to show them how they can do it and that it's actually quite easy.

Valerie: It's so important for businesses to tell stories about their customers, and they can do that in a number of ways. It's actually making sure that people hear or see the before, during and after of the customer journey.

Stephanie: Things like taking the tent out to different locations around Australia. And using their photos and their stories to help, sort of, drive our own story.

Kerry: How our customers feel about what our clothing is when they put it on is part of why we do what we do.

Valerie: The great thing about storytelling is that anyone can do it. As human beings, we're hardwired to tell stories. So think about where storytelling can fit in your business.

Video: close up of Tom sitting in front of a table outside, overlooking a pretty coastline on a sunny day. On the table to Tom’s right are 2 Sofi products.

TOM: My name is Tom McLean and I’m the founder of Sofi Spritz

Video: Cut to product pouring into a glass over ice

TOM: Sofi produces a range of all-Australia wine spritzers, inspired by classic Italian recipes

Video: Cut to chopping board where two hands pick up some sliced lemon and lime

TOM: Our first product was inspired by the Veneto Spritz

Video: Slightly wider shot of hands silhouetted by the sunset. The hands are slicing a blood orange, with a bunch of mint behind and sliced citrus in the foreground

TOM: Which is the most popular cocktail in Italy. It’s traditionally bittersweet, bright coloured, and built on a base of dry white wine or prosecco. Our product is made by adding blood orange and bitters to a base of Riesling wine with a dash of sparkling water. We’ve also just introduced a new flavor, lemon & elderflower, which is inspired by the Hugo spritz, which is very popular in the Italian Alps.

Video: Close up of both the elderflower and blood orange products

TOM: You can think of them both as classic Italian cocktails, but with a modern Australian twist

Video: Return to med-close shot of Tom in front of the table

TOM: I visited Italy a few times, and I guess I just noticed they had a very different kind of drinking culture to Australia; outdoors, piazzas filled with people enjoying aperitivos

Video: Shot of a male and female, sitting on the grass, looking out to the water from the rear

TOM:It wasn’t until we moved back to where we are now

Video: Wide shot of solitary surfer paddling out, transitions to surfer paddling & catching a wave
TOM: And I’d have a lot of barbeques in my backyard, and I guess I thought back to that time, and it’d just sorta (sic) be great. To translate that classic Italian recipe into a modern Australian setting, luckily I found some really fantastic partners. A 5th generation master wine maker, I managed to track down an expert flavourist who’s had huge success with other products in the past I teamed up with two agencies based out of Melbourne, a branding agency called “Love & Money” and a social media agency called “Willow and Blake” who’ve had very significant success in social media, and e-Commerce, with some other products so, um, I felt like they could provide the expertise that I needed. Social media presents for smaller businesses like ours; that don’t have the bigger marketing budgets to be nimble, embrace, um, the latest platforms and I guess engage with customers without spending huge amounts on marketing.

Video: Shot widens to Tom on laptop as Tom scrolls through the Sofi website.

TOM: We thought it would be nice to create a personality, um, that could come to life through the social media; it’s not my personality (chuckles), uh, being Sofi, but it is something we thought could not take things to seriously but engage with our audience, make people laugh, I think the social media is as funny as hell. We think is more interesting than just posting product shots over and over. We do a lot of events, so we do the big good food and wine shows, we do as many farmers markets as we can; we started at Bondi but try and do basically every farmer’s market in Sydney

Video: Tight shot of screen as Tom punches in his postcode

TOM: We try and give people a taste, and hopefully they want to come back for more and one of the ways they can do that is through online. Online was crucial early on before we had that retail distribution established, and it was a way for us to get traction, get early revenue and prove the product in market

Video: Tight shot of laptop screen on the Sofi webstie

TOM:When we wanted to move online, partnering with Farmhouse Direct, I guess, was an obvious choice, given it’s, in my mind, an online Farmer’s Market. So we thought it was a really nice fit. A lot of our sales have come through that, so they’ll send out emails and do free shipping promotions, and people, um, I think, are receptive to such a different product. And, uh, the support from Australia Post makes things a lot easier. A couple of lessons I’ve learnt, um, to move (sic) to online retailing would be put effort into building your audience and also leveraging off other networks, so um, partnering with Farmhouse Direct was important because they have an established network who are used to using their e-commerce platform, and are regular shoppers; and I think, um, partnering with someone like that who, has a customer base, who’re used to using that service is hugely valuable. We’ve certainly also alongside online, we’re starting to build distribution through the big retailers, so we’ve just gone into over 1,000 BWS stores, we’ve just launched our second flavor, we’d like to basically have, um, full coverage of Australia in terms of retailers and we would like to, um, have a diversified product range, always making the most of quality Australian wine. I think success for me would just be, um, to have a lot of people enjoy my product, and, and, uh, seeing people enjoy it, and, um, y’know right across Australia and I guess, it would be nice to think that I’ve created a new market for quality Australian wine.

Video: Fades out to white, fades back in with Australia Post, SmartCompany and Startup Smart logos, fades back to white.