Tell us about Dirty Janes.
Dirty Janes stores are now in three locations – Bowral, Canberra and Orange. We are a community of stallholders specialising in vintage and bespoke wares. We’re all about upcycling, recycling and repurposing vintage items. Our fully curated stores showcase each stallholder’s passion, be it making furniture, selling vintage homewares, art or other decorative items. All 200 stallholders are interviewed before they are offered a stand, ensuring the quality of items on display and for sale is high and they bring a spirit of community to the stores. Each store has an inhouse florist and Canberra and Orange host cafes within the buildings called “Salters” serving fresh, locally sourced produce on their menus.
What inspired you to start Dirty Janes?
It was my father, Athol who first spotted the vast iron sheds at the back of our original store in Bowral. He thought an antique market would be perfect for them. We scrubbed and painted and he bought in a few fellow dealers to set up the first stands.
That was 15 years ago. It wasn’t long before we realised we could expand Dirty Janes to include makers and creatives. We were inspired to create a vintage market where everyone is welcome, where you don’t have to have hundreds of dollars in your pocket to afford something. I love the idea of helping artists and artisans create a bricks and mortar store that they don’t have to work in. Our stallholders bring in their beautiful wares and then our team of customer service staff sell the items to visitors. We manage the whole centre for the stallholders. They can spend their days in their workshops creating their beautiful stock, merchandise their stands and we take care of sales, deliveries and all the back end of the business.
There is so much to know these days about running a bricks and mortar business. I want to free up the stallholders to be creative and simply do what they love.
Tell us about your career and background.
I have an Arts Degree in Communications, majoring in Organisational Communications. It taught me how to look at processes within a business for maximum effectiveness. I’ve always loved vintage and antiques, selling my first restored piece when I was eight years old. I dabbled in selling antiques whilst at uni and during the years of my first few jobs, finally realising that vintage was in my blood and it was the career I wanted to follow. I lived in the UK with my husband in my early 30’s and would travel, buying antiques from barns, auctions and markets to ship back to Athol for our shop The Shed. It was a three-year shopping spree. It was fabulous.
I’m passionate about ensuring charitable works are included in the day-to-day running of Dirty Janes and am so proud of our partnership with St Vincent de Paul and Argyle Housing at our Canberra store. They have created the “Good Works Garden” – a veggie garden run by volunteers where produce is delivered to the Blue Door Kitchen, providing meals for those suffering from homelessness. We also support the Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation throughout all our stores and are very happy to help out schools with props for plays and vouchers for raffles.
Describe a typical work day for you.
I don’t think any day is typical, but I’ll try! I’m an early riser, so I’ll be at the warehouse talking to our cabinetmaker by 7.45am about customer orders, what pieces I’d like worked on and what store they will be delivered to. By 8.30 I’m at Dirty Janes Bowral to revamp our own stand. We import containers of antiques from Europe so there is always something to price or re-merchandise. By 9.00am I’m catching up with the management team to go over events at the stores, what social media promotions we are doing, and other day-to-day items. Occasionally I’ll be called on to visit a deceased estate or clearance to buy stock. I love this work, chatting with people and hearing the stories that are embedded in the items they are selling.
We published two books last year which was great fun. I’m trying to squirrel away an hour or two each day to work on another book…I also serve as Chair on a local board. I’ll try and pick up our youngest from school by 5.00pm and be home to feed the dogs, the chooks and then enjoy dinner around the table with whoever happens to be home. We’re so fortunate to live in a beautiful regional community where everything is close by so the commute is 10 minutes door to door.
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
OK here are three tips. I won’t call them easy, but it’s a place to start:
1. Follow your passion! There is nothing like doing something you love so it hardly seems like work.
2. Have a financial plan and stick to it! A budget always blows out, so start low – knowing you’ll spend more.
3. Start small, identify your market and know what makes your business unique. What is your point of difference? If you test your idea on a few people and ask them for feedback you’ll be able to tweak your ideas and products without a huge financial outlay.
These are such simple steps to take and can make all the difference in what works and what doesn’t.
And while there will be naysayers who disbelieve, try to identify and ask for advice from a possible mentor. There is nothing like experience and career wisdom to help you navigate the waters of small business.
What’s next for you, and Dirty Janes?
Now that Dirty Janes Orange is open, after a journey of 18 months from when we first identified the site, I think the team needs a bit of time to reflect on the success of their hard work.
Dirty Janes Orange has an upstairs area we’ll be fitting out for more stallholders to move into in the next 12 months and I’m sure there are other initiatives the staff will come up with that we’ll want to work on.
Staff always say to me that “no two days are the same at Dirty Janes” – you never know who will walk through the door, who will call with a business proposal and I like to think the team and I are open to these ideas. After all who would have thought an old shed with a few curmudgeonly dealers could have started us on this path all those years ago?
