this is Daniel and Luke they built suas into a multi-million dollar fashion rental Empire from the ground up after losing a co-founder and facing their first major challenge they secured a crucial $25,000 investment and turned a small space in Luke's Grandma's flat into their business headquarters we do whatever we could to to get the suits out the door and we used it all all from that Granny flight their Journey began with a simple idea when Daniel saw an opportunity after discovering us Company Success in the Fashion retail space despite losing 95% of their revenue overnight
due to co Luke had to process about $110,000 worth of refunds in one day which almost killed us in this video I share how they overcame these obstacles how they started suit as a side household during their University days and how they grew their business with minimal resources I'm Davey foggy and this is another Memoir of my daily Mentor students I'm Daniel and this is Luke we're both co-founders of sutta Australia's first and only online suit hire company Luke and I were best friends from high school basically we met in Year s English class I
started studying Bachelors of Commerce at Sydney uni I always knew I wanted to do that from a very young age particularly at Sydney uni I don't know why it Sydney uni but it's exactly what I wanted to do I ended upating a masters of commers after 7 years but yeah during uni is like the perfect opportunity to start a business because it's like you've got no responsibility you can do whatever the sort of thing you want particularly if you aren't even going to your classes you've got plenty of time to give something a crack and
that's what we sort of did so when researching for uh suda we saw in the US there was a business that literally had raised like $60 million Us in venture capital and they were doing some ridiculous numbers doing 25 million a year after five or six years and we just thought wow that's crazy like that's so much money so then we thought well why not bring it into a new geography and start what they're doing over there and and bring it to Australia and and that's what we did the day I had this idea I
made a few calls and me and my friend were literally at an Investor's house that night pitching this peer to peer fashion rental idea after spending about 3 hours at his house going back and forth we literally had investment that night for $25,000 the following day our investor literally drove to his Warehouse picked out 100 suits for us to start basically renting out and that's literally how it happened so we got 100 random suits delivered in the car we literally had all these suits and we're like well how what do we have to do launch
a Shopify store upon having those suits we had a Shopify store up the following day and then we started selling launching a Shopify store is as easy as going to YouTube so basically we're just watching YouTube tutorials on how to link up domains and basically how to put products in and and all the product images all that sort of stuff very simple tutorials online to follow and uh it got us up and running I think what I learned that day was if I practically didn't take any action on an idea it's just an idea if
you don't take any steps to research or do anything about the idea nothing's ever going to practically happen so taking action is what I learned that faithful day so as soon as the Shopify store was ready like a week later we we're putting like $5 a day into Google ads um I put my mobile number up on the Google ads and we're basically starting to get all these inquiries as soon as someone called we would literally drive to their house anywhere in Sydney with like a car full of suits and basically just figure out what
they wanted to buy we didn't know what was the popular Styles at the time we didn't know anything about suit fitting um but basically I I got in my car drove all around Sydney and basically was just hauling 25 suits into someone's house and they would pick one give us like 120 bucks for the the rent and we were going and pick it up a few days later so it's crazy how it sort of started everything was going so well it was chaotic but it was really really fun um we did like $10,000 our third
month in business I couldn't believe that people were paying money basically to have a suit delivered to their house despite the first few months in the business going so well I finally had to face my first challenge in business and this was actually a co-founder um that started the business with us I was working my ass off doing 14-hour days doing absolutely anything or doing whatever it took to start basically getting a business from zero off the ground he decided to go to Japan for 3 months he promised before he went that he would be
doing work and I was making sure that he was going to keep doing everything to keep the business rolling unfortunately he wasn't logging on and it wasn't doing any work for me that was really really disheartening when I was working my absolute ass off to try and get it off the ground after going back and forth on messenger for a very long time he decided that he wanted to leave the business basically because I was setting unreasonable expectations on the time so basically we agreed to buy him out and and he could go on his
way but um yeah it was it was not a good time my lesson is it's very important for you trust in business particularly at the start like if someone's not got the same expectations or the same driv as you to get off the ground then it's it's really really challenging to even stay motivated yourself because you're worried about someone else instead of staying on your naturual business I had up 200 suits that were lying around my house to be rented not knowing really what to do because we were growing really quickly and my house wasn't
keeping up with the demand and I was getting so disheartened by our co-founded doing nothing in Japan I just didn't know what to do I I thought about giving up so me and Luke were having a beer and I was telling him how disheartened I was about Pudo not really growing and how demotivated I was I then remembered Luke had uh some storage space and I was really desperate for some storage space at the time he was really really excited and passionate about the idea he was telling me that he had some troubles with another
co-founder and that they were were no longer in business together and I thought that this was a really good opportunity for for me to try to put my hand up and get involved this is a business that I I'd seen his passion for uh and it's something that I had believed in as well because I'd been hearing from the start he he was telling me every day we were doing this we were doing that it was a chance for me to work with my best mate do something that is potentially outside of my own comfort
zone I am not from a business background per se so it's a chance for me to really uh push myself and and and see where I can go personally I had lots of trepidations going into business with my best friend um firstly because I just gone through a very negative experience with a a former business partner and two he's my best mate like we we've been best friends for so long and going into into business with a best friend is incredibly risky cuz you might lose that friendship forever so I knew that Dan needed storage
space for these suits I had a granny flight available which was about 40 50 sare m it was just a nice little room previously we were using it just as a hangout area we had a TV a mini bar full of beers and and that that's what we used it for so we slowly started moving some some suits in and fulfilling all the orders out of there we'd pack suits on a on a ping pong table that we had in there we'd do whatever we could to to get the suits out the door and we
used it all all from that Granny flat our schedule at the time was crazy we were at Uni fulltime 9: to 5:00 and we still had side jobs which were working like 5: till 9: all we had was our spare time to work on suda where we would go through customer service tickets and go through dirty laundry and go to the dry cleaners and pack orders it was a mental time where we were working 16 hours a day but that's all you could do at the beginning when you had no money when I first came
in Suda was a bit of a side hustle for us it was uh we still were still at Uni full-time we still had other jobs but we were really passionate about sudor and doing what we could to go that so we might have a couple orders a day which um I would have to fulfill at night so I was doing all the customer service the website and all the marketing and and Luke took care of all the operations so he did all the dry clean go through customer returns pack orders we sent new numerous wrong
sizes out at the start we sent the wrong color out like we made so many fulfillment errors at the start with manual entry it was it was it was not a pleasant time so when I first came into Suda I knew nothing about men's fashion I knew nothing about suits suit sizing Australia Post dry cleaning these are all things we had to learn from scratch it was something that was a really exciting process we did not understand what we were getting ourselves into but the Journey of visiting customers houses going and seeing brides and grooms
that are about to get married and hearing their complaints hearing their wants and needs that really grew our our knowledge and we had to become experts in suits pretty pretty damn quickly to keep this business going One customer experience that really sticks out to us we refer to as bride Silla we went to the house five separate times in Sydney with different suits different colors different sizes and the night before their wedding at 900 p.m. at night they wanted to change all their suits the day before the wedding we didn't have the stock we didn't
have any of the sizes and we just thought to oursel we cannot do this we cannot go to this person's house five separate times we knew we had to give the best customer experience possible but we realized that we had to change the business model it was too labor intensive and we had to basically pivot and come up with a better solution and a more effective solution so it wasn't so labor intensive so after all these struggles I decided that I needed to create a process that is going to be scalable so we decided to
take advantage of Australia posts with the next day delivery Network we decided to optimize our ins and outs our returns processing one of our biggest struggles was because people don't know their suit size it's not something that every man knows especially in Australia you know your average man might not wear a suit that often so they just don't know that sizing so we included two jackets and two trailers for everyone and that decreased our customer service increased our reviews and that was really important for getting us to the next stage things are going really well
in 2019 uh we're scaling really really quickly up 300% Year onye we're almost going to quit our full-time jobs and drop out of uni to pursue it fulltime new fulfillment system was working really well people loved the two suit idea Luke and I were the perfect combination I was doing all the marketing he was doing all the operations I was learning about SEO and Google ads got to the top three results for Su High related terms in Australia and then Co happened we were doing $1,000 days in March 2020 and then we literally lost 95%
of our Revenue overnight after lockdowns were announced cuz no one could get married and no one was having events and Luke had to process about $10,000 worth of refunds in one day which almost killed us luckily the one Saving Grace we had was that we were still operating out of my granny flat so there was no rent that really helped us get through the next 12 months otherwise it would have been really really in a bad way so we took that opportunity during Co to really focus on growing our back end we made a new
website we did a new photo shoot and we really tried to develop uh our processes and our forward- facing marketing and and website we knew that eventually Co lockdowns had to end and we wanted to be there right at the top of Google in the number one position ready to go and suit up all of these new Co couples getting married straight away after lockdowns and that's just what happened our sales started to Skyrocket we did 300% growth that year we moved out of the granny flat into a massive warehouse and really exciting opportunity started
to come our way we went overseas to Source our own suits and we finally got to design the suits the way we wanted to with the high high quality Fabrics with our own sizing guides and it really helped us develop our business the way we want to run it after doing 1.7 million in sales we got the awesome opportunity of being able to pitch on Shark Tank last year I had been a massive fan of Davey's videos and implemented a lot of what he was talking about on his YouTube channel into what we've been doing
with suda and then be coming away from sh tank with a deal with Davey and Sab was absolutely awesome and absolutely life-changing [Applause] deal best friends Luke and Daniel couldn't be happier that they've managed to sew up a lifechanging de since Shark Tank we've been able to double our business we're currently making a new website with Sab and his awesome team at King Kong and we're expanding internationally so there's absolutely nothing stopping suda from being an absolute Global force in our industry sudu is successful because we are so customer orientated I know it's cliche but
um we spoke to our customers very early on in the early days to implement into our process now and that's what's being able to scale us to this point my biggest advice for any entrepreneur is start when you're young when you're young you've got less responsibility uh you can take more risks you can learn very very quickly you're adaptable you're flexible and you've got more time in your hands so working with your best friend it's a really cool opportunity it does come with its challenges uh we have a very open Communication channel so if something
needs to be said we're not afraid to say it as it is we do manage our relationship in some ways we try to make sure that we're always having fun with everything we're doing and we have some time every week where we just put business aside and and hang out as mates we find that really important in Bal balancing the the business and friendship relationship but it's something that I would never change for anything in the world
