Tell us about Hussh.
Hussh is channel for wholesalers and brands to clear end-of-season and excess inventory quickly and quietly via physical warehouse sale events held exclusively for Hussh members.
Most wholesalers and brands – even the best ones – get stuck with stock at the end of each season. Our company allows them to reduce their volume of aged stock, generate cash quickly and not expose their product or brand to the wider, open market.
Wholesalers generally don’t have a consumer base to call on when they need to sell end of runs and discontinued lines, so we offer a direct-to-consumer channel where we invite our database of over 300,000 members to shop directly from the warehouses of wholesalers.
While most brands have their own customer base, some prefer to not market heavily discounted product to them – they keep their offers premium and leave the distressed offers to us. Or we’re a wingman for some brands. They have their sale and then we run a sale to Hussh members the following week which allows them to reach a separate audience and have two bites at getting the revenue.
As always, content is king so to ensure we’re keeping our members engaged and satisfied, we vet each wholesaler’s offering to make sure it’s something we think our members will be interested in and at a price we think will be worth travelling for. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time with discounts they could find at their local shopping centre.
How did it start?
Mum started a shopping tour business in Melbourne over 35 years ago (now Melbourne Shopping Tours), sending bus loads of shoppers to the back street warehouses of Collingwood and Abbotsford during the eighties and nineties.
In 2012 we approached each wholesaler, about 20 at the time, to see if they’d be interested in opening for special sale event days also. We started promoting the service to the bus tour passengers. They’d then write their phone number or email address down if they wanted to hear about future sale events from the warehouses they visited during their shopping tour. Most did! At that stage there was about 20,000 – 25,000 passengers a year so it as an effective way of starting a targeted database.
The business was really a side gig for many years. I managed the database and sale notifications whilst working full-time in communications and marketing and when I realised working in the corporate world wasn’t that much fun anymore I jumped on this full-time and found new ways of acquiring and engaging new sales and new members.
Tell us about your career and background?
It’s been a series of jobs, experiments and flukes. I’ve lost count of the number of jobs I’ve had since my first job at Brumby’s Bakery serving bread rolls at 14 years and nine months. I started four university degrees and finished none. Following a stint working on private super yachts I returned to Melbourne and fell in to communications, marketing, events and TV production for the ESPN X-Games, Top Gear Australia, Red Bull, and Hurley. It was all great experience but in the end I didn’t enjoy it any more. I didn’t want to be the MD of a company but I wanted to learn new things so remaining in position wasn’t going to work either so I took to Hussh full time and here I am. I’m basically a digital marketer and when I went to uni, such a job wasn’t heard of.
I think if you’re prepared to work hard and listen to the right people, then changing careers is not difficult and well worth it. I learnt to work hard from both my mum and dad who have their own businesses and watching their hard work pay off has been the biggest inspiration and motivation to run my own business.
Describe a typical work day for you?
Our business is quite cyclical and has specific times of the year when it is busy and other times when it is quieter. During the busy times we are very focused on the operational side of the business – setting up sales, publishing and distributing our sale content and generally making sure that all of our sales are reaching their intended customer base and we’re achieving the best result possible for our clients.
When quieter we focus on managing the database to make sure that we only keep active users, searching for more external leads for new clients and longer term business planning for new territories and sales methodology.
What advice do you have for wanting to start a business?
Make money or at least have a plan to make money in the first 6 months. If you’re not making money after 6 months, re-evaluate. Businesses are hard. Sure, it’s great to be your own boss but there a plenty of sides to running a business that are frustrating and stressful – it’s not for everyone. Have a go but there’s no shame in putting it to bed if it’s not working. Move on, quickly.
What’s next for Hussh?
We work with over 200 wholesalers and brands in Melbourne which means Victorians are spoilt for choice! In 2019 we plan to run more physical sale events in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra by expanding our client base and audience in these states and also bringing some of the Melbourne-based wholesalers into the other states for annual sale events.
In 2018 we launched our own pop-up warehouse facility and service in Melbourne for brands who don’t have their own space to run sale events – who use fulfilment companies for example or who don’t have the time or team. We’ve run over 20 sale events there since it opened in March and businesses are finding that it’s an effective service, so the plan is to have one in each city.
At the same time we’re building an online offering so that our members in other states can access some of the great deals from warehouse sales with out physically being there. We also have plans to launch a personal shopping service – a shopping assistant will walk you through a sale via Facetime / live video stream so that members anywhere can shop a warehouse sale event! I’ve been doing this sort of shopping over the phone for years for friends and family so it will be fun to do this on mass for any member, anywhere.
To find out more about HUSSH, please visit https://hussh.com.au.
