We recently caught up with Alice Fitch, founder and CEO of Whola and one of InDaily’s 40 under 40 for 2021 to discuss the opening of her bricks and mortar business in Brompton and her motivation for applying for the City of Charles Sturt Business Support Program Grant.
Whola is a B2B fashion wholesale platform, that has been operating since January 2020 and as Alice explains: “is a digital disruptor in fashion wholesale whose mission is to make life better for retailers, by making their store instantly relevant to their customers”.
Alice has a strong understanding of the fashion industry in Australia, working in fashion wholesale for the past 12 years. After selling her previous business, Alice in La-La and having a baby, Alice was pondering her next career move. One night while painting her house she had a light bulb moment: realising that the whole fashion buying business could be simplified for her customers by digitizing the processes.
Whola, a game changing business
Whola was to become a one stop online marketplace that takes away many of the touch points retailers deal with ordering stock that gives them direct access to Australia’s best fast to market fashion brands. At Whola buyers can save time and money, by searching, comparing and paying securely for their stock immediately rather than shopping around. Rather than being bombarded with emails from suppliers, Whola provides a single daily update that is tailored to the retailer’s requirements
Seeing an increasing number of independent boutiques and fashion brands pop up over the past few years, Alice could see the sector needed innovation and streamlining. Alice tells us that unlike other countries that are dominated by large department stores, Australia has a unique retail landscape dominated by independent fashion boutiques. This is the reason behind Whola, a game changing online fashion wholesaling business.
Why is it game changing? Alice explains that its about simplifying the process for busy boutique owners and providing a tailored service that allows them to spend more time on building their business.
Alice clarifies: “So the old way of doing fashion was that six months in advance, you'd go and see a new range and pre order your items and then when it landed, you had to have a crystal ball to work out what your trade was going to be like and what styles and size ranges you're going to need. You had to take all that risk upfront, whereas we've flipped that around and we now sell in season, so if you need something in store you can order it from Whola and have it in store tomorrow”
Providing a platform for buyers to make better decisions
Alice’s vision for Whola was also about providing a platform for buyers to make better informed decisions.
“We learnt that there are 17 touch points in the process for retailers sourcing stock from various fashion labels and retailers, once they have chosen the pieces they want to sell in their boutique, they can wait months for the products to reach their store.”
With each of these touch points, someone must touch the order. Therefore, there are many opportunities for things to go wrong. This was the beginning of Whola, where Alice envisaged the whole process being done in one place automatically.
Alice highlights further: “We currently have a dispatch timeframe of 24 hours. This is exciting for the industry as we can be much more responsive to the customer’s needs. So, we have clients all over Australia and we have about 10% of our clients overseas”.
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Supporting local
Given her contacts in the fashion industry, Alice set about creating a business that sources a broad range of homeware and accessory brands and fashion labels, with a commitment to supporting local independent designers and makers.
“We have 101 Australian brands on this platform, right, and they're all Australian owned labels. Not all of them are made in Australia, unfortunately we don't have the capability, for apparel in Australia but all our beauty products, all have our candles are all natural and all made in Australia”.
Providing a complete service for business owners
Alice is passionate about innovative digital developments and expands on how her business provides a platform that incorporates much better tools to manage buying, marketing and sales, making the processes more integrated and automated. Not only does this help retailers but suppliers as well. Alice highlights:
“A lot of suppliers aren't set up to manage sales themselves. They are really great at designing collections but when it comes to the sales, marketing and invoicing side of things that is not necessarily their key strength or where they want to spend their time. We do all the sales, marketing and financial movements for them. It’s a full service that leaves them to be able to focus on planning ranges and making sure that what they're doing is on point for the season, and getting the best production done”.
Alice stresses that’s it’s not all about fashion, it’s also about having a robust system in place to make your business sustainable. One area where retailers often get stuck, especially starting up, is finance, Alice explaining that: “securing finance is getting much more complicated”. Most suppliers have moved towards payment before delivery and Alice is keen to provide affordable financing options for retailers to take the pressure off, especially for new boutique owners.
Alice’s vision is to empower retailers by taking the hard work out of sourcing the best labels and on trend stock.
The new space at Brompton, is bright and fresh and Alice has managed to secure a strong team of 14 young women, to help communicate to her customers and market her business.
Business Support Program
Alice was our first business owner to complete the City of Charles Sturt Business Support program and was thrilled to have taken part in the program stating:
“I used the Business Support Program for a high impact project to implement a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management system which resulted in an outstanding customer experience for our clients”.
COVID-19 and its impact on business
We asked Alice how COVID-19 impacted her business, given Whola started during the beginning of the pandemic?
“I think going back to our launch month, COVID-19 had already hit in China, but nobody really knew about it., China is often closed, during Chinese New Year, but is usually only a couple of weeks. Suddenly it was a couple of months and we were unsure what's going on, we couldn't get supply so that was really challenging”.
Alice explains how online retail expanded exponentially in Australia during COVID- 19.
“We had so much demand and weren't able to meet the supply We've now ironed that out, but that was a big challenge. Building a custom software platform, is quite complicated, and a challenge in itself, however we've overcome that. We have a pretty outstanding user experience and a NPS* rating of, about 60, which is really good. Customers love using our platform and COVID-19 has seen online retail grow exponentially”.
*NPS stands for Net Promoter Score which is a metric used in customer experience programs. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company. NPS scores are measured with a single question survey.
Alice’s tips for someone starting up their own business
- Be creative: “Starting a business is always more expensive than you expect so you need to get creative, think of other ways to achieve your objectives without money”.
- Plan but be flexible: “I've recently gone back and reread my original business plan for Whola to analyse whether we’ve achieved everything in that plan. I think something around having that plan in place and then referring to it is important to make sure that you're on track”.
- Don't get overwhelmed: ”I’ve learnt to meditate, that's my way of dealing with it. But I also do a thing that I called Swiss Cheesing - so I've had lots and lots of projects on I'll do a little bit of each of them until they all come to completion. Don't get overwhelmed with how much is going on”.
- Network: “So, your potential competitors are unlikely to share knowledge. But if you look to other industries that have a similar business model you might be able to learn something from those people. Yeah, which is something that I did a lot”.
- Secure a Mentor and their opportunities: “Having a mentor has helped me immensely in my business and there are programs, such as the City of Charles Sturt Business Support Program, that are ready and willing to help you gain access to relevant mentors to gain confidence and skills in an area that you need help in . I have been very proactive in reaching out previously I got a scholarship again to the closed doors network which was an excellent experience, as they introduced me to an amazing mentor who actually ended up becoming an investor in the business.”
- Set time for professional development: “As a founder of a start-up, it was important that I was performing at my A-game to lead my team to execute our growth strategy”.
Taking time out for professional development
Alice was also successful in receiving the FIXE Scholarship funding, to support her in Zonehigh leadership training.
Alice recalls: “Zonehigh enabled me to develop techniques to increase productivity and enable clearer decision making and inspirational leadership of my team. I chose a course that centred on meditation, and more spiritual wellbeing in order to achieve business objectives, and it has been outstanding.
We still do team meditations from time to time, and it has helped me develop better relationships with my team and create a better team culture. It’s a slightly different way of looking at my goals and plans and how to reach them so it's been really helpful. The immediate result has been a huge boost to our team culture and growth in employee satisfaction”.
Alice also received a scholarship to undertake the Flinders University Professional Certificate for Innovation for Transformation, which gave Alice six weeks to focus on creating Whola’s story and testing the business model.
What next for Whola?
In the past 18 months Whola has managed tosecure clients all over the country with Sydney being their key market. Alice explains they were the early adopters of the platform, so they were the first lot of stores who really got on board and embraced it as a technology.
“The next year is focusing on both improving the label experience so making it as easy as possible for them to get as much distribution to the right retailers as they can, and then expanding our overseas markets will be my next goal”.
Alice would also like to focus on generating interest for South Australian retailers:
“South Australia has been a little bit slower to support us in the other states. So, I would really like to do some activation so that they know that we're here, and that they get a chance to sort of see it and touch it in person and then build that trust with them”.
Congratulations to Alice winning the Women in Innovation SA 2021 INNOVATION AWARD, in the technology category. We look forward to catching up again soon to find out how Whola is leveraging this great award.