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 proud of diva. We’re very proud of Lovisa. We’re proud of all the brands.
BK: Now, tell me, you’ve said you wanted to have a national business for no particular reason. Is this what happened with diva? Did you say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a global business?’ I guess what I’m getting at is, was it driven not just by economics, but more by a challenge?
BB: There’s no question. Sometimes it’s hard to say this without it sounding sort of cute or arrogant, but sometimes you wonder, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we could do that?’ Absolutely, that comes from a drive to want to do more and be better– continuous improvement. It comes from a sense of, ‘Let’s break the mould. Let’s do things that haven’t been done before.’
There are two parts. One is that it’s just a part of my nature, probably. But two is it’s also proven to be successful because you’ve always got to be breaking the mould. You’ve always got to be moving forward.
BK: These are not businesses that you can just sit down and say, ‘That’s done.We’ll just let the cash start rolling in.’
BB: I’m not sure there’s any business you can do that to. So I think it’s a business necessity, at least it is for growth, if you want to continue to become more dynamic. But you’ve got to push yourself to improve. You’ve got to make some mistakes to learn from them, but hopefully not too many. So I think there’s a nice combination of it being a sensible thing to do from a strategic point of view. It’s also important to do something that keeps you fresh and current and moving forward.’
BK: And good to retain your best people by challenging them.
BB: I think that’s the nature of our organisation. I’m not sure that that would be true for everybody, but there’s no question that if you’re a leader in BB Retail Capital, you know that there are no easy days. You’ve got to keep going. Not everybody likes that culture because it is continuous improvement. If something can be done better, then it’s going to be done better. It’s not, ‘Oh, it’s OK,’ or, ‘Our result is good.’ It really is about whatever we’re doing now, we’re going to do better next year. And that can be a bit relentless to some. I don’t see it that way.
