FASHION entrepreneur and designer Samantha Wills invested her last $500 for space to display her jewellery at Australian Fashion Week in 2004. And it paid off bigtime.
But the cost of a sudden influx of orders worth $17,000 plunged her $80,000 in debt.
“I think if you knew everything that was ahead of you with starting a small business then you probably wouldn’t do it,” Ms Wills, 37, told a business lunch yesterday.
At Fashion Week she promised to deliver to customers within a fortnight and had to leave her job at Surf Dive ‘n’ Ski to focus solely on frantically filling the orders.
“I quit my job and threw everything I had at getting these orders out … It wasn’t brave, it was naive at the time,” she said
The Port Macquarie-born designer now lives in New York and has plenty of glitzy stars flaunting her jewellery, including Eva Mendes, Taylor Swift and the entire cast of Sex and the City 2.
She was in Sydney yesterday promoting a short film shot in New York and featuring her talking about overcoming the odds and believing big. The film was funded by Optus as part
of the telco’s campaign to support small and medium businesses.
Ms Wills says to be a successful entrepreneur you need to have a passion for what you are doing and stick with it, no matter what gets thrown at you.
You must be passionate about it … when you are in debt and all these things are going against you, it is the passion that keeps you going.
Her business now has a turnover of $12 million a year, with 70 per cent of revenue coming from Australia and the remainder from the United States, Japan, France and Korea.
The designer’s pieces sell through department stores, boutique retailers and online. She doesn’t
have plans for bricks and mortar shops.
“We always consider ourselves to be a digital brand so if we were to do experiential retail it would be more pop up and limited edition spaces,”
Ms Wills said.
She also chairs the Samantha Wills Foundation, which is committed to empowering women in business by providing them with advice and sharing her own experiences.
“Worldwide, women own or operate 33 per cent of all small businesses … when women support women the possibilities are infinite.”
This article first appeared in The Daily Telegraph | written by EDWARD BOYD.
