Business Owners' Wisdom. Brett Kelly
kept it in Melbourne, I was Sydney. Daniel and I spent almost every day of our lives talking to each other on the phone, sometimes ten times a day.
BK: What have been the greatest challenges for you? Most people have identified finding and keeping good people?
BB: Sure it is.
BK: So, you know Daniel is the right guy. He’s ambitious. He’s got the right character. you give him an opportunity to buy in and you know that he fundamentally respects you and agrees on those foundational principles that you think would make it successful. Even though you’re not there, you can ticktack in and it’s as good as being there.
BB: It’s as good as being there. We had a terrific relationship. He absolutely honoured the principles and the culture in the way that I understood it –customer first and the need to create energy through our culture, standards and disciplines. That was very important. The second thing was we liked each other.I have always had the privilege, as an owner, of working with people that I like.
We had a good relationship. He was the sort of guy that when he was stuck on a decision, he’d pick up the phone and say, ‘What do you think we should do here?’ And we’d talk about it. Then he’d go off and make the decision. Now, I’m always very involved and I certainly was back then. So, it wasn’t that I wasn’t playing the director role. We would talk regularly and I’d be a part of that. But fundamentally, I was putting most of my effort into Bras N Things.
BK: And before you got out of that business, he’d done about fifteen years with you?
BB: Yes, probably at least fifteen because he started when he was sixteen, remember? Other great leaders came out of that era also – Greg Milne, Shane Fallscheer and my sister, Tracey Blundy.
BK: How do you find them?
BB: We focused on succession planning. It wasn’t even something that I thought was some great business idea. When you’re growing retail fast or growing any business fast, you’ve always got a demand for people so it’s forcing you to think about it. It’s forcing you to watch people. It’s forcing you to give people a go.
Back then, I was young I didn’t have a problem with making someone who was twenty-one a regional manager if they had the right attitude. I think, in lots of ways, we’ve lost a bit of that as we’ve all got older. The organisation’s got older.I’ve got older. The leadership’s got older. We forget that twenty-one-year-olds can do the job. Not all of them, but some of them. We shouldn’t look at someone and say, ‘You’re too green.’ If I had done that twenty-five years ago, we wouldn’t have many of the senior leaders we do at the moment. I’m a huge fan of youth and energy. And retail is not difficult. It’s just demanding.
BK: That’s a really good line.
BB: It’s true. As a result of that, you’re looking for people that have good attitude, that can commit and work hard.
‘I’m a huge fan of youth and energy. And retail is not difficult. It’s just demanding.‘
BK: And work through the obstacles?
BB: And you can have a stellar career at an early age in retail. We’re always behind.Having said all that, we haven’t got enough people. And as we go around the world, it’s the same thing, trying to find quality executives. Because now, it’s not just, ‘Oh, we might send you to Western Australia if you’re keen.’ Now, we might send them to Russia or China or South Africa or Brazil and that’s another obstacle.So it takes an even more unique person. So, again, if you’re keen and ready, you’ve got a head start.
BK: Tell me the story of diva. I find it interesting that here you are, a bloke from country Victoria who goes into bras at twenty-odd, and then you get into diva.
BB: It’s a fast fashion girls’ jewellery. Well, girls are great shoppers. That’s the key.
BK: How many diva stores are there globally now?
BB: About seven hundred.
BK: And how many countries are you in?
BB: Twenty-two.
BK: How did you get started in this business?
BB: OK. I’ve probably touched on a couple of things related to what was driving me in regards to Bras N Things but along the way, I’ve missed so much in the story. Brett, at one stage, we had a hundred and ten Sanity stores in the UK.So I was having the joy of flying over to the UK every month and spending a week there. While I was over there, I noticed this spectacular jewellery, costume jewellery. I looked at it and thought, ‘This is £3. Just look at this stuff.’
It was just mulling around in my mind as, ‘That’s the next thing’. I wanted to deliver quality stuff that women were going to wear once at $9.95. Or you could wear a different pair of earrings every day to work. It was fast fashion, disposable fashion. And vertical was very important to me.
Bras N Things had started to shift aggressively into vertical, which means we weren’t buying brands anymore. We were going direct to the factories, designing, creating our own stuff, and bringing it in. Essentially removing the middleman, making everything faster and more dynamic. Customers loved it. This was going around my head when I was doing store visits as I do every Thursday night. I was walking down to a Sanity store in the Imperial Arcade in Sydney when I saw a store called diva. And that was it. Someone was doing exactly what was in my head.
I loved the look of the store and the product that was in it. I rarely talked to Vanessa, my wife, about business, but I went home that night and said, ‘I’ve just seen this great store that’s exactly what I was thinking we ought to do. diva, in the Imperial Arcade.’ And she said, ‘That’s my boss.’ She was working for ‘3’, as in ‘3’ Technologies, phones. She was in charge of the rollout. Anyway, she said,‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. They want me to come and be a part of it. Not just as an employee, but as a part of it.’ I thought, ‘That’s interesting, what are they planning on doing?’
To cut a long story short, we had dinner with Mark and Colette Hayman. They were going to franchise the concept when I suggested I’d fund it, help them with the funding and the strategy. That was the start of diva. So I ended up with a third. Vanessa ended up with three and a third percent.
Vanessa and Colette got on and started rolling stores out. Colette took care of the product, Vanessa ran operations. It was a fantastic success. And a few years on, Mark and Colette came to me and said, ‘We’re done. Do you want to buy it?’I said, ‘Sure,’ and that’s what happened. So I bought it all and then we pushed it around the world.
There are two things that are very important to diva and now Lovisa. Two years ago, we created Lovisa as sort of a more Sex and the City version of diva, which is more appealing to a different stage of life. But diva has always appealed to me because it’s global – and I believe retail is going to be more and more global – and because we’re totally in charge of the entire supply chain.
BK: So you design the products, manufacture the products and ship them directly into your stores globally?
BB: We do it by air, so it’s very fast. It’s a very global business because we don’t have to worry too much about localised needs. The more global the world becomes, fashion just becomes more and more the same. Essentially, that is why diva and Lovisa are global-growth businesses whereas my other businesses are still predominantly Australian. We’re very