We’ve been approached to present at the AIMIA to talk about our story with VIPARO and provide some start up business tips and learnings. Here is the agenda below:
| 1.50pm | Case Study: Viparo catering for a gap in the market
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Taken from: http://www.aimiadigitalsummit.com.au/pages/agenda
Hopefully we can include pics of our presentation and you can see who we look like :O. 
There are many ways to market and promote your fashion brand but we all know the fashion industry is a very competitive one. If you run an online store, your website is not enough to generate sales especially if its a small business. One of the most popular websites where you can set up a store (and one many big clothing businesses under-estimate) is eBay. Our eBay store is the most popular leather clothing store in Australia and we have been fortunate enough to have eBay promote us on their homepage a few times and feature in the Grazia Magazine. Some of our customers feel comfortable shopping at this store and many find out about us through here. eBay is Awesome!
Westfield has approached us and we were referred by a shoe company (thank you to the unknown referrer – please let us know if it was you). The monthly cost is reasonable and sales have been okay so far – its been 2 months. 
We are glad ASOS Marketplace has approved our brand to create a store on their platform. It’s a small fee and they requested only ‘street’ images i.e. no professional shots. This was easy as we have already collaborated with many fashion bloggers to style our garments. It’s been only 1 week and we are already receiving a positive response. We are already ranked 57th out of 250 boutique stores. And our street images have been featured twice already in their blog.
Covetish: This is a common and easy platform and its the pay per click system. As the name suggests, we only pay when one of their visitors click on our site and purchase. Its a cute and pretty website, low overheads and its a place we like to surround ourselves. 
I got to the event at around 9:30am and was very excited to listen to the following speakers:
Matt Barrie (From freelancer.com) gave us a talk about how he started freelancer, the strength of the freelancing market he is in and also, a few of his thoughts on why certain businesses do succeed more than others.
Lesson Learnt:
Its 10% about the product and 90% about execution.
Andrew Morrello, the winner of the first Australian apprentice and now works alongside Mark Bouris at Yellow Brick Road was the next to speak. He gave us a quick summary of how he started and also his values on WHY he does business.
Lesson Learnt:
You can have all the money in the world but will it make you happy? Find out the reason why you are getting up every morning doing what you’re doing.
Jack Delosa, the young entrepreneur under 30. He was very passionate about building a strong business to make sure it is sale-able/investment ready.
Lesson Learnt:
Highly successful people have said to prepare yourself so when opportunities arise you are able to catch them; this also relates to building businesses.
And finally……
Ruslan Kogan, the owner of Kogan Technologies and Milan Direct. Kogan is one of the largest growing companies in Australia. He is one of the top e-commerce faces.
Lesson Learnt:
- Build a culture in your business to suit what your business stands for
- Only find the best staff
- Embrace competition, it will only make you better!
Overall, I think it was a very successful Entourage event and I will definitely come again next year. We have also very excited to work with the Entourage team in October for 2 days to bring our business to the next level, and to provide all our customers better valued products and better services.
CREDITS: Images taken from The Entourage 
