What the Chinese Want

Brilliant Wall Street Journal article "What the Chinese want" discussing how Western brands need to adapt to market to the Chinese consumer.

Hiring

What an awesome job offer, and such a great way to attract great talent, offer personal development as your point of difference.

Jason's post 'Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone' is another really good one worth a read. I've been reading quite a bit on the topic that interviewing doesn't work, the best way to judge whether someone will be a good hire is to either have worked with them before, or have them work for you for a short period first.

via @ianlyons

The third industrial revolution - Digitisation of Manufacturing

Great article from The Economist.

Michael Bergdahl - The Critic

The keynote speaker at the AMPCSC BRW Australian Retailer of the Year Awards last week was Michael Bergdahl, author of 3 books on Sam Walton and Walmart including the first retail business book I ever read, The Sam Walton Way. When I started working at Supercheap Auto I asked the then CEO Bob Thorn if he had any good retail business books I should read, and that was the book Bob handed to me.

After watching Michael speak and being presented with the awards for Sneaking Duck I approached Michael, told him that story and invited him to lunch with our team the following day. He shared some great insights with us, including an inspirational verse titled 'The Critic' which outlines how businesses and individuals should deal with criticism which I filmed.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us Michael!

BRW Australian Retailer of the Year Awards - Sneaking Duck Wins!

Wednesday night was a very exciting one for Sneaking Duck, we won both the awards we were up for at the BRW AMPCSC Australian Retailer of the Year Awards. We won the New Retailer of the Year and Innovation in Retail awards.

The awards dinner itself was a fantastic night and we had the opportunity to catch up with and meet lots of colleagues not just in the online retail industry, but the retail industry more broadly. It was fun to share a table with the team from Grill'd who I've blogged about before for doing such a fantastic job with fast food retailing.

The full list of winners is below - congratulations to them all:

• Outstanding retailer of the year - Dan Murphy’s
• New retailer of the year - Sneaking Duck
• Multi-channel retailer of the year - The Body Shop Australia
• Sustainable retailing - Woolworths
• Innovation in retail - Sneaking Duck
• Successful retail marketing campaign of the year - Bankwest
• Best customer experience of the year - Aussie Farmers Direct

Article and photo in the current BRW issue here.

TechCrunched

Great Shoes of Prey write up on TechCrunch today. :D

Starfish leads $12m series C round in StyleTread

Congratulations to Mark Rowland, Bjorn Behrendt and the team at StyleTread on raising $12m in a series C round announced 6 weeks ago.

From all accounts StyleTread have been experiencing some impressive growth. They've got a fairly capital intensive business as they need to be investing in stock ahead of their growth. It's great to see that investment firms like Starfish Ventures, as well as StyleTread's existing investors are willing to back them based on their performance so far.

Amazing Presentation

Probably one of the most engaging presentations I've ever seen. It's a beautiful combination of technology and storytelling.



via @vinoaj

Retail and media converge

We're currently hiring 5 new Sydney based roles for our Shoes of Prey marketing team. I was reflecting on this and the challenges the media industry are facing and they're related.

TV, newspapers and magazines are struggling to keep their readers' attention as new media sources like blogs and social media capture more of peoples' attention and time. Have a look at 3 of the 5 roles we're hiring for:

• Copywriter
  
• Web Graphic Designer
  
• Videographer
  

These are not roles you would traditionally have in a retail business, they're media roles.

We're hiring for these roles because we, and many other retailers are becoming more like media businesses. We have two blogs, a shoe/fashion blog and a business blog. These take people's time away from fashion magazines and business press. We're very active on our Shoes of Prey Facebook page and there's 82,000 people there who now get some of their fashion news through us rather than traditional sources. We're planning to invest more in our YouTube channel and video content on our website, that's less time people will spend watching fashion content on TV.

Retail and media businesses are converging. I'm not sure what this means for the media industry, but it couldn't be better for retailers, we're finding new and exciting ways to engage with our customers.

Image Credit

Startup Nation Survey - Floqapp

Love this survey on the Australian startup seen that's being run by Floqapp.

Details of what they're doing are here. If you have a startup, click below to take the survey.

We're Hiring: Customer Service Wonderperson

Shoes of Prey is continuing to grow. In addition to a Copywriter, a Graphic Designer, an Online Marketing Manager / Analyst, a Marketing and PR Manager and a Video Production person, we're looking for another customer service wonderperson to join the team!

Salary: $40k - $50k (based on experience) + bonus + generous stock options + lunch everyday + snacks + shoes. If we hit our goals over the next 5 years you'll do very well out of the stock options.

Location: Our Surry Hills office.

Job Description:
To passionately create happiness is our first and core company value, is something we prioritise immensely and has been core to our success to date. We love going out of our way to make our customer extremely happy. Your sole focus will be the happiness of our customers, you will be responsible for ensuring they're the happiest in the land.
As our customer happiness team continues to grow, the role has the potential to develop into one that includes building out and managing this team.

Some of the key day to day activities:

• Engaging with our customers over email in the most friendly, fun and supportive ways possible.
  
• Doing the same with our customers on website chat and on the phone.
  
• Assisting customers who visit our office to try on, see and touch our shoes.
  
• Reviewing customer orders and sending these to the workshop.
  
• Working with our team in China to track and manage our orders.
  
• Helping develop and document our customer related systems and processes.
  

Skills Required:

• A love of and experience providing truly outstanding, amazing customer service. We're looking for someone who is passionate about pleasing customers and is seeking a career in this type of role.
• A passion for women's fashion and shoes
• A fun, people loving personality
• A great fit with our culture & values
• A love of constant change and the fast paced mayhem of working in a startup
• Perfect grammar, spelling and email communication skills
• Attention to detail

The role will report into Michael Fox. To apply please email a cover letter and resume to michael@shoesofprey.com

Please help us spread the word. We'd love for you to tweet or post this link to Facebook (buttons below) and if you know of someone who the role would suit we'd love you to pass this post on to them. Thanks!

Update (3 June 2012): We've now hired for this role. Keep an eye on the blog as we'll likely be hiring for this role again soon as we continue growing.

Retail Week Technology Awards 2012

We're very excited to be shortlisted as a finalist in the UK Retail Week Technology Awards 2012 in the Internet Technology Solution of the Year category, for our 3D shoe designer.

Congratulations to our software engineering and product design teams!