568: No Experience, No Investors, 5 x Million Dollar Businesses - How Brittney Saunders Did it

37:22Yeah, that's what honestly my whole career has been. And I think starting that YouTube channel when I was so young and learning how to build a community before building a community was even really a thing and building a personal brand. I didn't know I was building a personal brand. I was just making the fun videos. But I think that is what has set me up for success in building Fate was because I just learned from being, since I was a how to entertain people, how to grab someone's attention. And I obviously had all those skills from YouTube that I could then take into starting Fate. And that was like my strong point was like, I can build a community around this brand.

38:03But even then, it was never intentional. I never thought I'm gonna con these people into buying all my shit. It was just like, I wanted to share my journey. And in doing so, we then have built this whole community within fate. It's been completely organic. Like I think organic marketing is the reason why we are where we are now and like why I'm doing what I'm doing. And I learn it all from YouTube, but there's no secret sauce or strategy. People often ask me, how do you do it? And I think it's just using my common sense and my personality at the end of the day. There's no book that I could write that's like a step-by-step how to build a community online it's simple it's being yourself it's just being authentic I've never been afraid to look like an idiot or make fun of myself or laugh at myself and I really think that's been one of the powers in doing everything that I've done and I think even back to when I first started those YouTube videos in high school no matter all the things that I've done in between now and then I'm still the same And people will say, you're still the same.

39:13Like I've been following you for 10 years. Obviously, I've grown up, matured a bit, learned a thing or two. But at the end of the day, I think I'm just still Brittany from Newcastle. And I think that's been like one of the biggest key factors in the success of FATE is that I've just always been open, transparent, sharing my story, the highs and the lows. And people have really resonated with that over the years. And I think that's why the FATE community is now so big. Yeah, you've done an incredible job. And I can see now that you're starting to build your YouTube channel again. Talk us through that.

39:48Because you don't have the old videos. They're all gone. Yeah, I got rid of them all and just kept the ones about fate. So if you go onto my YouTube channel, the few videos that are there from all those years ago is when I started documenting working at fate. And it was when we moved out of the garage. There's no videos of the garage, but there's videos of us in our first little 90 square meter warehouse because I thought, oh, now I can show this to people because it seems more legitimate that we're in a warehouse, not in my shed. Same thing anyway, just a little bit bigger. So, yeah, for the last couple of years, some of the girls at Fate and I, we've just been saying we should start the channel again.

40:27And also like our community saying, come back to YouTube, you know, because me letting go of YouTube about four years ago now was like a big decision for me to make. because it was my everything at one point there. But then fate became bigger and bigger and bigger. And it was getting more serious that YouTube started to become not the priority because I had staff that I was looking after. And so at the end of last year, 2024, we said, let's just start the YouTube channel back up again in 2025. And so that's what we did. I think it was the first or second week of January this year. We, I signed back in.

41:05I had to figure out my password and everything. And we've been posting one video a week ever since. And it's just like a little side thing. It's just for fun. It's not really like we don't have any goals with it. It's just there for anyone that wants to watch it. And it just gives us another platform for people to see, you know, a little bit more than what they see on Instagram and TikTok. And it's just fun. And you started other brands as well. Why start others? Why not just focus on one? Again, that's just me being me and I will try anything that pops into my mind. I don't have any hesitation when it comes to thinking of something and wanting to do it.

41:44Like I'm just a weirdo like that. I will be laying in bed at night or I get out the shower and I say, AJ, and he goes, what? Because he just knows I'm going to say I've thought of a great idea. So, yeah, we had fate and we just did like women's clothing. then we did a swimwear drop with fate yep um and it went really really really well and we called it the staple collection yep and it was like black and white swimmers just really basic and we used models that had all different body shapes and sizes and skin tones and this was in 2018 I want to say and the response to it was just phenomenal because no one was really doing that back then like showing because it was in the Instagram era where you know it was just if you're in bikinis you're like a Victoria's Secret model and so again just using all these girls that I knew and we hired a little Airbnb and did a photo shoot there and it was just super successful and I remember saying to AJ we've got another brand here and that's where Staple Swim came to be but fun fact i haven't been making staple swim for the last year and a half because i've been in my first ever legal battle oh okay a trademark battle oh i know a lot about those yeah yeah okay so what happened um there's a company that oh i'm here you said you love a story here's this good story for you december 2023 last day of work for the year for our full timers before the christmas break we're at the warehouse because at the time we had our warehouse and the office was in it and we're having our christmas barbecue on the last friday before everyone knocked off for two weeks over christmas that's another thing that we've always done we've we don't have any blackout periods over christmas in our business even though we're in retail our staff can always take the two weeks off and aj and i just flog ourselves through those two weeks and get all the orders out for bloody boxing day sales anyway that's another story my phone no my phone lit up and I got an email from trademark lawyers because we have been trying to get the Stapleswim trademark for so long by that point and someone has challenged it.

44:04Yep. Yep. And I remember my heart sinking. Like we're having our Christmas games and AJ's cooking the barbecue and I got my email. I'm like, what the fuck is this? Went and showed AJ. He's like, oh, no. Great. good another company has owned the trademark of the word staple which i have no idea how they got that because that is such a basic and descriptive word that every business and brand uses they have owned it since 2009 and they're not happy that i'm trying to trademark staple swim so we've been going back and forth ever since then trying to win and the lawyers are still confident that we've got this in the bag and so we're still going and so I made the decision back then we had like stock um at the at the time that was like still on the website and whatever and we had other collections planned to come out and I didn't know how long this thing was going to take and in the clause it's if we lose we've got to burn our stock yep um and i'm going because we've never dealt with anything like this before i'm like what like actually set it on fire and aj's like yeah we have to prove to them that we burn it and so i made the decision back then like end of 2023 going into 2024 i'm just going to put a hold on this because i don't want to commit to making more collections if I lose and then I'm gonna have to burn it all and so that's what we've been doing ever since then 2023 we haven't made any new swim collections and I've said to our community um like staple swim is just on hold for now and we we hope to bring it back but let me just deal with this thing first and so we've just been going back and forth you know what it's like why do these things take so long can't we just all come to a decision yeah so I've had a few I've had my first one.

46:04So in the first four months that I started Founder, it wasn't called Founder, it was called Key to Success and was sued by Success Magazine. And they owned the word success and they trademarked it when trademark law was introduced in the 1900s. Wow. So yeah, these other companies had staples since 2009 and they're doing it to a heap of other brands as well. So we're not the only one with the word staple that's going through this. I don't know if they got new owners or whatever and they're just going through and doing a big clean out. Who knows? Yeah. But, yeah, we've been dealing with that and hopefully we're going to be able to make a comeback because I'm ready to do a comeback collection.

46:43But, yeah, that's how Staples started because we did that Fate Swim collection. Looking back now, we should have just kept coming out with like Fate Swim. But, I don't know, just me going, yeah, let's do another brand. And then the tights came after that because we saw just the rise of activewear becoming so popular in Australia. and they were their separate brands but then eventually we got rid of their two websites and now it's all on the one website so it's like all a part of fate but they're still their own like sub brands yep okay so that's where form comes from as well yeah okay so now it's all within fate yep and all on the one website um and that's yeah that's the story of how they came to be was because we did that swim collection and it just went absolutely bonkers yep okay and then outdo collective and outdo expresso yeah so because we're from newcastle um there's i mean new is up and coming now but you know a few years back um there was nowhere for us to shoot content yep like no photo studios or anything like that and we were often traveling down to sydney to just shoot with models and it's like two two and a half hour drive for us to get to sydney and two and a half hours to get back so it's like five hours five hours of driving and then you got to do a big shoot day as well um so i again me just being me and wanting to give anything a go i said to aj why don't we build our own content studio and he said okay he just has to go along that's smart and so this was three years ago now yep okay now there's content studios everywhere because it's become a big thing but there was none in newcastle at the time so i found an empty commercial space um like a long strip um and so we went in there i'm like this is perfect great natural light it was a um cold shell so it was just a gray concrete room yep um and i'm like let's build a content studio in here we can use it whenever we want but then we can also hire it out to other people that want to use it and then the commercial space was so long and i i have like a big hospitality background from back in the day.

48:48I was like, why don't we just throw a coffee shop at the end? Again, just another one of those like little ideas that I had that's just so crazy, but it's just the way that my brain is. And so we opened the coffee shop as well. So we built them. I documented the whole thing on Instagram three years ago. And we opened both businesses at the same time. Hired a team, went and did coffee training. I knew how to do it. AJ did some training. He taught himself how to do it all. and we got in there and we were working in there every morning when we opened and it just went bonkers like people absolutely loved it and even still now three years on like they're getting smashed every weekend and we had the content studio for about a year and a half renting it out to other people even had like small functions in there a lot of professional headshots corporate headshots little micro weddings because it was just like this beautiful blank white space that you could just transform with styling um but as we as time went on with that um we started to have to bring in more rules more rules don't touch the curtains don't bring red wine in blah blah blah blah and it just got to the point where i'm like this isn't even worth it because it's so much admin to hire it out for you know 150 bucks an hour because no one else was doing it in new and i didn't want to be too expensive because it's newcastle yep even though it was a state-of-the-art fit out um and so the bookings become less and less and less and less and less because we're like no more parties no more hens blah blah blah it's just head shots and photography and so after about a year and a half of taking bookings in there we stopped it completely and then it was just our studio and then i had the grand idea of why don't we move our fake newcastle store which was at another location into the content space yeah so we made the move and that was last year yeah so now our newcastle boutique is next door to our coffee shop and they complement each other so well yep yeah all because i opened the content studio make a lot of moves yeah yeah i love it so all right so you've got five stores right now in all around australia queensland um victoria and new south wales just on the east coast Yep.

51:04Plans for international? No plans. We do have a lot of customers in New Zealand that say, open over here. Yep. How the fuck do you open a store in another country? That's what I say. Do you want to do it for me when people ask? Open in New Zealand. I'm like, you're going to manage it for me? You're going to go in when people call in sick? You're going to figure out the roster? No plans for global scaling. Every owner that I talk to says, you know, what's your plans to go global yep i'm like i feel like i'm still just getting started in australia um but no no plans to open stores overseas yet like never say never but i'm really happy with where we're at now in 2025 this is the first time that i've ever put the brakes on fate not to say that i've slowed it down um but this is the first moment in time in the last three years that we haven't been opening our next store yes and i think it's been really good for the company and for me um because it's allowed me to kind of slow down and take a look at everything that we're doing um and you know refine our processes make sure that everything's running smoothly like we've done a massive overhaul of the way that we do all of our operations our our retail stock just everything it's allowed all of us to kind of make sure everything's yeah running smoothly at the end end of the day before we go growing more and more and more because it's very easy to get caught up in that let's keep this momentum going and we absolutely could um but yeah I've put a a pause on like continuing to roll out more stores for now and I think it's been one of the best things ever because I've felt like I can breathe that that we don't have another store opening because it takes over your whole life when you're opening a new store especially when you're doing the whole fit out and I'm so hands-on with every single store opening.

52:52I'm the one dealing with the agents, the leasing agents, the architects, the builders. My phone's ringing all day, every day. So-and-so not on site. So it's a lot and it just takes over our life and it's super fun and exciting. But yeah, for now in 2025 so far, we've just been focusing on the foundations of the company. And I think it's really important for businesses to do that every now and then, rather than always focusing on growing, I think it's really important to also focus on like nurturing where you're at. And like where I'm at now, I never could have imagined in a million years when this all started in the shed that we'd be at where I am now.

53:30And I think in 2025, again, like how there's so many successful, crazy businesses out there and you're living in a world of comparing yourself to all these other businesses. It's just important to stop and look at actually how far you've come and what you're doing now and just be like, you know what, I'm happy with where this is at rather than always thinking of the next thing. So that's what I've been doing this year. And where did that come from, this shift?

53:59Just how hard it all is, especially when it comes to opening a new store. Like there's so much work and so many moving parts and our community always say, open in Perth, open in Adelaide. And I just think like, do people not see like how big of a commitment that is? And yeah, we just did, we did four stores back to back after, cause our Newcastle one, we just had since 2019, it was just our newy store. Like it was just easy, you know, it's around the corner from us. And then we did the other four back to back and like, it's great. and I loved opening them all back to back, but it's just a lot.

54:42Like it's a lot on our team. It's, yeah, it's a lot on every department of our business. And then we had to, you know, move warehouse last year because we opened all these other stores and we need more room for stocks. Then we had a massive warehouse move last year, which was a monster of a job and I never want to move warehouses again. But now we've full, like filled up our current warehouse already, like not even a year into the five-year lease that we signed. So AJ's been at another warehouse this morning, but it's only across the road. So we're just going to like have two. That's cool. But yeah, we just had like so many years of extreme growth.

55:22And, you know, when you're opening more stores, then your warehouse team needs to grow and your head office team needs to grow to be able to facilitate these stores. and so I just think we opened our Parramatta store in November last year and that was just the end of the year and like we ticked that one off and it was all up and running and then we went into Christmas this Christmas just gone well it's nearly six months ago now which is crazy that was the first Christmas that AJ and I have ever had off work since starting Fate and so we had two weeks off and like we didn't go and pack orders which is crazy like we did our boxing day sale online early so that our warehouse team could pack the orders and then go on their holiday as well and so AJ took our AJ and I took our first ever break and it was just so nice and I think it was that that made me realize I don't always have to be thinking of the next big thing we can just slow down and kind of enjoy where we're at we're still growing despite the fact that we're not like making any massive moves, like opening more stores.

56:29Like the businesses continue to grow in those five months, which is crazy. But yeah, I think it was just like the end of a crazy 2024 that made me go, let's just stop for a second. And I'm going to stop looking at commercial realestate.com because I don't want to get any other ideas. Let's just enjoy this for now. And you know, in a few more months time, like I've done the book and everything else. So I've been super busy regardless. But it's allowed me to focus on, you know, more of my personal brand. I've been able to start doing more business style videos, which I'm finding I'm really passionate about.

57:02And it's just allowed us to focus on ensuring our team that has been with us for so many years are all still good, despite the crazy last four years that we've had. Because all of their jobs have evolved completely, like April and Grace that are here today. Grace started as a casual in our Newcastle store. Now she's a national retail manager of our five stores. so I've got all these staff that have been with me through the last crazy four years so now we've just like stopped and like we're still busier than ever but yeah it's just been a nice slow down kind of I just spat across the table no look I respect that I just um not not many founders I hear say hey we're gonna pause and take stock it's usually just go go go go go and never stop to think Yeah.

57:50I think it was AJ and I having two weeks off at Christmas that made me think I'm not going to look into opening any more stores for now. Yep. Mind you, sometimes I go on commercialrealestate.com and I just see what's around in Adelaide or, you know, Tasmania, our customers ask us to open. We get asked to open stores everywhere. But it's just been good to just slow down and make sure that everything that we're doing now is just running how it's supposed to be. Who knows? in two weeks I could start the next store like but you never know and I'm I operate very randomly like that all right girls come on we're doing another store we're going to Adelaide and they're like all right here we go again um but yeah for now we're just cruising but still scaling um and focusing a lot on online and our five stores that we have for now I've always said that I don't want fate to grow too big that it's out of my control.

58:45I think I'm one of the most hands-on CEOs that there is. I feel like when people think of CEO, they think of someone that goes around to the business stores and whatever once a year and you don't know anyone's name or whatever. But I've got my fingers in every corner of the business from what warehouse staff member has said something about someone else and they're upset with it all the way through to what's happening in our Melbourne store and everything in between. And I like it that way. And yeah, like you just hear of these owners scaling so big and exiting at 200 million and whatever, but I don't know.

59:25I think it just goes back to me just being Brittany from Newey and I'm just happy to be amongst it all. And like, I love it still. And I've had so many founders say to me, get out now before you hate it you're not bitter and twisted yet no and people like get out now like just get out now before you despise going to work every day um but i absolutely love what we do i love going to work every day um love working with my team love being in the warehouse like i just love it so that's where we're at for now you mentioned around being hands-on i love personally that you run your own ads and you're in it, you know how to grow social media accounts.

1:00:07Like you're still, like you said, very, very hands-on. Why is that and do you think that that's important for founders? I mean it's different for everyone, I think. I think it all comes down to your circumstances and what's going to work best for you and what's best for the business. But I just love all of that stuff. Like one of our team members is moving overseas and she's our e-commerce coordinator. And so we've just had to put up a new ad yesterday. And I am looking at the ad and we're posting about it on socials. I'm like, that's my dream job. Like if I could play around with Shopify and EDMs all day, like I would love to do that.

1:00:48So I think it's just I love doing all the things. I love being in the meta business suite and ads manager. Like I just genuinely love doing the tasks. You want me to upload some stories, I'll save them from Canva and post them. Like I just love doing stuff like that. Yeah, it's a craft. Yeah, I really enjoy it. Like us putting up that ad yesterday for our e-comm coordinator. If I didn't do what I do for a job, I would love to do that job, you know, because that's just a dream. I love like shuffling collections on the website and uploading new banners and making it look all pretty and optimizing the website so that it's going to get the most amount of conversions.

1:01:23I love making the ads. I love checking the ads every two seconds on my phone to see how they're going. I love pushing the budgets up to see if I can make a bit more. So I think that's why I'm still so involved with every inch of the business because I just love it. Yeah, no, look, I can resonate with that. So the unfortunate thing is, though, is as your business grows, you get further and further away from that over time because you have more people and you really have to make this transition from founder to CEO. Yeah. So how has that been, that transition? It was hard like a few years ago because I was so hands-on even still like maybe three years ago where I was designing our EDMs.

1:02:09I was shuffling the website. I was doing the e-com photography because we do everything in-house at Fate. There's nothing that gets done externally. Like we do all of our e-com shoots, all of our shoots. Everything is done internally, all of our PR, influencer marketing. it's all in-house and so I do remember a few years back when fate was like getting a lot of traction having to hire new people and teach them the things that I loved doing and letting go to be like okay you can design the EDMs from now on and I remember um being like but I love doing that you know like you don't want to give it up yeah and especially when you started something yourself from scratch where you've done everything like I remember even giving up customer service emails a few years back and being like, oh, okay.

1:02:51Like giving that task away and trusting someone. But I recognised back then and continue to recognise over the years that like that's what you need to do if you want the business to grow. You have to step back and focus on the key things that you really want to do or that's going to benefit the business the most. But let other people do those smaller tasks because otherwise you'll just get bunked down in the day-to-day and then you won't be able to focus on scaling. so I've definitely done a lot of that over the years and even though I'm still so hands-on now you know I'm not replying to customer service emails I'm not packing orders I'm not doing returns I'm not doing anything on the website even though I absolutely love it because I know that someone else is better off being paid to do that so that I can focus on making our next video go viral or building my personal brand because I know that when I build my personal brand in turn it supports fate um so that's really what my focus is now but i'm still the kind of boss where if shit is hitting the fan give me a call and i'm there yeah i respect that that's where it should be yeah yeah so you guys obviously have driven a lot of growth of the brand through you your story through your organic channels and then you know you're in you're in you're in the the back end to Facebook, do you guys spend much on ads?

1:04:09I think at the moment I'm spending about 150 grand a month on ads. And I think I can spend more. I think I'm playing it safe. What do you mean think? Because I think I can go bigger, but I'm just testing and like growing the budgets a little bit more and a little bit more. And our ROAS is really good. What's really good? Like, I mean, you can't really ever judge it on a drop night, but like on a drop night it would be like 20. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. And like my friend, do you know Anita from Hero Packaging? Yeah, we've interviewed her. Yeah. She was the one that taught me how to do ads. Okay. Because I had an agency doing them for us for ages and I never understood anything they were saying to me and I was paying them a heap of money and I'd get these big fancy reports every month and I'd be like, what does all this mean?

1:04:59You know, I feel like they were almost confusing me and I don't know if it was on purpose, but I remember just going, I don't like this. Like I don't like that I don't know what they're doing and I'm paying all this money and I think it's getting results but it was all so technical that I didn't understand and I dropped the agency and I said I want to figure this out myself. And I think one of my biggest strengths is I'm a really fast learner. You show me how to do anything once, I'll remember it forever. And so I said to Anita, Anita, I want to have a call with you because I saw her doing all her videos about her ads and I'd logged into our ad account so many times when I had agencies doing it and I'd be trying to figure it out But, you know, when you're looking at an ad manager and you don't know what you're looking at, it looks like it's in another language.

1:05:41And so I said, Anita, I need half an hour of your time. She said, all right. So we did a call and we screen shared and she just walked me through it. Like, and then I said, okay, leave it with me. I've been doing it by myself ever since. I don't even remember what your question was. Oh, the ads. Yeah, the rise. The rise. Yeah, that's impressive. You do drops every week. Sometimes every second week or sometimes every third. Okay. But on like a non-drop day because obviously with the seven-day attribution, whatever it is, like it's going to look like the results are amazing on a drop day because those people have been on the website within the last seven days.

1:06:20But otherwise, like on a regular day, our ROAS is still sitting at like eight or nine, which I think is pretty good for retail. Yeah. Look, I don't know your numbers or your margins, but that's pretty high. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And I just love it. Like I love checking it. You could potentially double the business by just doubling your spend. Exactly. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. I'm pushing the budgets higher and just seeing what I can do with it. And I just love that stuff. And I think our ROAS is so high and our ads perform so well because our content is so strong. Yes, 100%.

1:06:50It's a game of creative. Yeah. Our creatives are strong. And you have this incredible community. Yeah, people know us. And so people – Yeah, so it's not – yeah, it's not – yeah. It's not just like the ads are good. It's everything. It's the organics are strong. People know us. So it's that whole recipe that then we get the best results in meta. And I've been trying TikTok ads too lately and they're all right as well. But I'm just setting up random campaigns and seeing what they do. But, yeah, I love it. I love ads. We have to work towards wrapping up. I could talk to you all day about your stuff, Brittany.

1:07:27This is awesome. How long have we been talking for? About an hour. Maybe more. How long are the episodes normally? However long may end up being. Depends, depends, depends, yeah. So look, you did something really clever and you're really good at marketing. Like as an example, a lot of brands work with, you know, fancy influencers. They do the trips. You just got your top customers and did a trip with your top customers. Well, actually it wasn't our top customers. It was random customers. Okay, there you go. How do you, for anyone like that is looking to grow their brand, where do you get these kinds of ideas from?

1:08:04In the shower at night. In the shower at night, I get out and I say, AJ, and he goes, what? It's really clever. Obviously, I have a lot of experience from being an influencer back in the day and I was fortunate enough to go on a heap of those extravagant brand trips back in my prime. I think my prime's now, if I'm being honest. but you know back when I had those million subscribers you know I got to go to Coachella I went to Spain I went to Heyman Island with all those makeup brands and I got to experience you know once in a lifetime trips and that was before fate was ever a thing and I remember being so fascinated by the brand part of those trips that I would go on and instead of mingling with all the other influences that I was in Spain with to celebrate the NARS new mascara I would go to the girls that were working at the brand and ask them questions because I was just so fascinated to think of the budget that the brands would have for this kind of thing.

1:09:03Crazy, right? Mental. And they would fly people globally and they'll fly us business class. And I'm there going, this is 10 grand alone for this ticket. And there's 50 of us going on this trip. And I'd be there like in my head figuring all this out and look at the bedroom and they've decked it out with all this stuff. And so I got to experience so many cool trips in my influencer of days and I guess I always had the dream of being able to do that myself one day with my own brand and so we decided to do our first ever brand trip last year but I said let's not do influencers let's do customers instead which is so us because I feel as if though everything that we do is so different to all the other brands I'm not trying to be like everyone else I always want to have a point of difference and so it was our seventh birthday so we decided to call it the lucky seven and we just put it out organically on socials.

1:09:56I didn't run any ads for it and people had to place an order and use the Lucky 7 discount code to enter. So we got orders out of it as well and then we went through and randomly picked seven people from those orders and they were from all around Australia. It was for Australia only. We had people saying, do New Zealand. I'm like, oh, goodness, we'll start small. and then when it came to us deciding like how the event was going to look and what was the trip going to be like we were thinking do we take them overseas do we take them to Queensland like where do we take these influencers and I said let's just let's take them to Newcastle where we're from just just to start and it was like the safest option for us too so we you know treated them like influencers put them in a five-star hotel decked out their rooms like influencers and we just treated them as if though, yeah, they were influencers on a brand trip.

1:10:49And because it was our seventh birthday, we then also hired out this really cool venue in Newcastle and we threw a party on the second night of their trip and then we sold 250 tickets to customers to come along to this big grand event. So it was just so much fun, you know, and we treated them to getting their hair and makeup done at my friend's salon, you know, we went out for fancy dinners and lunches and just like wined and dined them and then had a big party with 250 customers and my friend helped me emcee the nine we did massive giveaways and prizes everyone got a goodie bag so we had to do 250 goodie bags got all other brands on board to like gift stuff and then we hadn't launched glazy our lip oils yet so everyone there got a glazy lip oil before anyone else and we got them to do this big unboxing all together and the room just like erupted because everyone knew that Glaze was coming out really soon and yeah it was just amazing and I'm just so glad that we did it and our community loved it because the amount of content that we got out of that was amazing and people just loved it so now we're like holy shit our eighth birthday is coming what are we gonna do for that and we would just top it I know yeah and so So, yeah, I think the coolest thing to come out of us doing the lucky seven is the friendships between those seven girls.

1:12:08They're all still friends. That's awesome. And they all still catch up and have a group chat and they're always like messaging us saying we're all catching up, you know, or like doing a Zoom call together because it's just priceless friendships in the community. Yeah, that's true community building. Yeah. That's awesome. So you wrote a book. We haven't really talked about it. What compelled you to write the book? and I yeah yeah so AJ has actually said to me for years you should write a book and I always said no no no no like I what would I write about he's like you've done so much and so it was this thing that AJ had always told me to do and I about two over two years ago now I got an email from Booktopia and they said do you want to write a book and I was like you know what yes I do and so that started yeah just over two years ago I had no idea how to write a book the same way I haven't had any idea to do anything that I've done yeah and I remember I had the first few like um calls with the team and then I thought oh maybe I'll go down to Sydney and they'll like interview me in person and like they'll write notes about me and then they'll help me and I remember we had our first few calls with the booktopia team and um they were like all right Brit well we'll wait for the first draft and i remember going what so you just want me to write the whole thing like yeah and i'm like okay and then i'm shitting myself i remember the night i was laying in bed with next to aj and i just opened a google doc and i just started typing yep well i didn't just start typing i said to aj what should i write as a first sentence like that's the hardest part getting started just like with a business and pun intended the book is called just getting started as well and i remember joking to him and saying how about i'll write like once upon a time yeah because that's how like you know fairy tales begin and so i wrote that as a joke and then i'm like no no no and i put a line through it it's still in the book that's the first sentence of the book is once upon a time yeah and it just was um yeah something that i would write at night laying in bed um chapter by chapter and it took me two years and a lot of pressure from the booktopia team to hurry up but it never felt finished and I kept going back and back and back and there's so many bonus chapters at the end of the book but it's just my story it's kind of what we've spoken about today from the very beginning and how I've gotten to where I am so it's a it's a memoir combined with a business book and a personal diary and yeah it's out now awesome yeah well look we have to work towards wrapping up brittany sorry you've got so many more notes that you've written down no no no no no look this has been fantastic you've been so open honest your stories are awesome i love it so look anyone that's listening to this they either want to start an e-commerce business i want to grow an e-commerce business for anyone in particular what would you say like what advice would you be if you could go back to 21 year old Brittany to start fate again what would you say what how would you go about it what would you do what would you share with people like what like how what does it truly take just guts I think it just takes guts and I've got a new saying that I love and I've been doing some keynote speeches lately and I've been using it as one of like my power slides and it's do it scared do it scared yeah a lot of people hold themselves back but because they're scared.

1:15:42What will people say? What will my family think? What will the girls that I went to school with think? Who gives a fuck? Do it scared anyway. People use being scared as the reason to not do something. If it's starting a business, they don't do it because they're scared. But just because you're scared doesn't mean that you can't do it. Just do it with the scared feeling anyway. If you're scared to talk to your boss, if you're scared to ask for a pay rise if you're scared to create your first piece of content for TikTok, still do it scared. Like just because you're scared doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.

1:16:15So that would be my advice to everyone. Awesome. Well, look, Brittany, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for coming down to Melbourne. This has been a fantastic interview. I got a feeling we might want to do a round two. Absolutely. Just let me know. Maybe in these couple of years. Absolutely. Wouldn't that be funny. I'll come back in a year or two and tell you what we've done. Amazing. Well, thanks for having me. If you love this episode, make sure to check out my interview with Emma Greed on how solving a problem she was so passionate about led to the creation of Skims and Good American.

1:16:48And so I do think it's so much of it starts with like addressing things that bother you, that you find, you know, you've got to create a solution for because, you know, at the end of the day you've got to be passionate enough and sometimes crazy enough to go round and round and round to actually solve a problem.

1:17:28Thank you.

1:17:58Thank you.

1:18:28Thank you.

1:19:00Thank you.