The bootstrapped story behind True Vintage
Through his love of vintage clothing, Rory Westbrook founded True Vintage out of his bedroom while still a student at the University of Portsmouth. Growing quicker than he could have anticipated, True Vintage has consistently doubled their annual revenue year-over-year since inception.
Using a combination of digital marketing strategies (including brand collaborations with Tommy Hilfiger and Urban Outfitters) Rory and the True Vintage team have built an engaged instagram following of over 300,000 people.
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we’re talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. Outrageous ‘90s fashion. Yes, on the show, joining us is a gentleman who, from his dorm room, six years ago, started I believe an Instagram account, and was able to sell out of his own collection of vintage ‘90s streetwear fashion. And I’m using the term streetwear loosely here. That turned into a website, that website turned into a seven-figure business, and then that spun off into what sounds like a service business in addition to that. So, of course the whole thing happened on Shopify. That’s what we’re here. That’s what we want to talk about, is growing our own Shopify stores.
So, to learn from that, to hear his journey, joining me today to discuss his love of vintage clothing is Rory Westbrook. Mr. Westbrook, how are you, sir?
Rory Westbrook: Hi, Kurt. I’m very well, thank you. Thanks for having me on the show.
Kurt Elster: And where are you calling us from?
Rory Westbrook: I’m based in London, in the U.K.
Kurt Elster: Oh, London is so cool. I have been a few times and there’s something about it that always captures my imagination.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, it’s a great place. Yeah. I love it, too.
Kurt Elster: So, Mr. Rory, what year was it when you… when the proto version, the earliest version of this business happened?
Rory Westbrook: So, it was 2013 whilst I was studying at university. I, as you mentioned earlier, was a collector of vintage clothing, so I used to wear it myself, I’d buy and sell it on, and whilst I was sort of searching into that, I saw there wasn’t an online store that was really doing a good job of curating a nice selection of vintage, and that’s when I decided to start the business. So, I sold my own collection first and started the business on Instagram. We had a great response and I sold out of my collection in a matter of days.
And on the back of this success I saw that yeah, there was definitely space in the market to start an online store, so yeah, within a week we had the website set up. I had stock coming in from around the world, and yeah, we quickly grew traction mainly on Instagram is what our main channel, and through sort of word of mouth. Yeah, we gained traction and I pretty much was running the business alongside university, studying full time, as well. So yeah, it was an interesting first year to get going and learn a lot on the way.
Kurt Elster: So, my first internet business was in college, used eBay as a marketplace, and I sold t-shits I made myself that infringed on copyrights that I was not aware of at the time. That’s how green I was. But at no point did I scale it in the same phenomenal fashion you did. I scaled to beer money, you scaled to seven figures. That is quite extraordinary. So, I want to unpack the start of it a little bit. This started I assume as a personal interest or hobby for you.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I was into vintage fashion myself, so starting this business allowed me to grow my personal collection. At first, it started as that, and just yeah, when it started gaining traction, I actually saw that there was a business here and potentially something that I was gonna be able to continue doing after studying. So, yeah, through lots of hard work and long days and nights, we built a pretty good business in the first year or two.
Kurt Elster: So, at this time you’ve got a closet full of clothing. It sounds like you were buying a lot of it online. I’m sure you were buying it in local thrift stores. Is that right?
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, buying it online, suppliers from around the world, and yeah, local thrift stores was another place where we managed to get stock. So, I was just spending all day every day searching through the internet or looking for new suppliers, and quickly got a good supply network and had [crosstalk]-
Kurt Elster: So, this wasn’t… This went from like not just hobby interest, it was at like an obsession.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah. I’d definitely say yeah, it was an obsession to grow the business and overtake competitors, and just provide sort of the best possible experience to our customers and get our name out there. Yeah, I was always sort of entrepreneurial from a young age and knew I wanted to start my own business. Once I found something that seemed to be working, I put a lot of energy into that.
Kurt Elster: So, it sounded like you had, I think you said you sold, you had 100 pieces and you sold out of those within days to a week. So, you didn’t start at like, “I just want to sell a few pieces.” What clicked in your head that you said, “Man, I’m just gonna clear out of my entire wardrobe.” Was this, you sold this stuff on Instagram? How did you sell it?
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so, I mean I wasn’t expecting it to sell that quickly, so I pictured everything and put it on Instagram, and chose the name, and followers soon started coming in and they would tag their friends in the images, and yeah, sold that directly through Instagram, messaging people and setting up payments through PayPal, so that was before launched the website. That was the first week. And just how quickly the stock sold out and customers asking for more stock, I knew that it was time to buy some more stock and launch a website to allow people to shop easier.
Kurt Elster: So, what kind of following on Instagram did you have at that time?
Rory Westbrook: So, I started this page from scratch, to be honest, so it wasn’t even using my personal page, so we literally started on zero, posted lots of stock, and back in the day of… Yeah, five, six years ago on Instagram, you could just follow as many people as you wanted, so I was sort of searching hashtags and searching other similar pages, and was following people on a regular basis, and we started doing competitions, and from word of mouth, that’s how it grew pretty quickly. And within sort of the first three months, we were up to 10,000 followers. By the end of our first year, we were up to 30,000 followers.
Kurt Elster: That’s rapid, phenomenal growth. Certainly, you had an advantage in you started on Instagram five, six years ago, when it was easier. If you had to do the same thing again today, do you think it would work, but just be slower? Or would there be a different approach you would take? What do you think?
Rory Westbrook: I would definitely try the same approach. Instagram’s still our best tool, and yeah, something that we spend a lot of time on, but it would definitely be a lot harder to get that traction now. There’s sort of limits on following people and so on, but yeah, we would definitely go for the same approach, as well as using blogs, as well, is something that we’ve recently found can be really useful, and influencer marketing, as well. Yeah. More or less we would stay down the same approach.
Kurt Elster: So, yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s like search hashtags, follow those people, but they limit the number of people you can follow, so it’s like that follow-unfollow loop, and there’s also a lot more people doing the same thing as you, so the engage… 30,000 followers for you five years ago has a much higher engagement, is a lot more real than 30,000 followers today. Would you agree?
Rory Westbrook: Yes. Definitely. I mean, with the changes in the algorithm now, it’s harder to reach your followers, so yeah, five, six years ago, everything we posted was seen by all of our followers, and the changes now makes it harder. Unless a post is doing well on Instagram early on, then the algorithm won’t show it to the rest of your followers.
Kurt Elster: Oh, interesting.
Rory Westbrook: They’ve definitely made that harder to reach those followers.
Kurt Elster: So, that’s a thing I had noticed and suspected in my personal account, but really… I’m not committed to growing it. Most of my Instagram experience really is limited to seeing what my wife has done growing her account to I think it’s at 5,000 or 6,000 followers, but like… And part of the reason I mentioned the engagement is like she has 5,000 or 6,000 followers on Instagram. The level of engagement and the audience there is different and less valuable than say 2,000 or 3,000 people on Facebook. So, clearly your core audience is on Instagram. Do you have experience with any other social networks? I know especially in fashion, people are very, merchants especially are very enamored with social media. That’s why I’m diving into this a little bit.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so we use Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and then we’re exploring Pinterest, as well at the moment. But from early on, I did start with Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, but Instagram was the one that really took off for us, and we still do pieces on Facebook and Twitter, but it never gets the same amount of traction, and given our products are so sort of visual and Instagram’s the sort of fast-growing social media platform at the moment, we have just put more time and energy into that.
But yeah, Facebook’s really useful. We can post pictures. We can message customers. And we can do ads on Facebook, as well. Twitter, given our business type, is a lot more difficult. It’s more of a sort of conversational platform rather than something showing off new products and being able to display nice images.
Kurt Elster: I feel like Twitter works better for B2B. I mean, I flat out, in 10 years of doing this, I don’t think I have a single… I can’t think of a single client or merchant that’s like… Their success is driven by their Twitter following.
Rory Westbrook: No. I would agree. I can’t really think of many companies that do that well on Twitter. Other things that I see is it’s used for sort of customer service, when people can tweet the company any problems they may have, but other than that, it’s not something that’s particularly useful for us.
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah, as a customer support tool, I suppose. You said you’re exploring Pinterest. Have you ever played with the app or service Tailwind?
Rory Westbrook: No, I haven’t played with Tailwind, but I’ll make note of that and I’ll check that out.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, check out Tailwind for, as far as social media tools go, their thing is Pinterest, and it’s really… It automates your repinning strategy, and the other thing that’s interesting about Pinterest is like the format of the image is a very specific thing that you need to nail it, it needs to be this portrait dimension, and that’s another one where my wife has excelled is with Pinterest marketing. But that audience is also… I don’t know that they’re necessarily as engaged. I don’t know. Maybe for fashion.
So, on the topic of tools, are there any social media tools that you can’t live without, that you would really recommend?
Rory Westbrook: Social media tools. We almost do everything ourselves on social media, so we’re trying to find good tools that will allow us to schedule in posts on Instagram, but given the sort of changes in Instagram being able to tag products, and wanting to post the story, we can’t find or haven’t yet found a tool that really suits our needs. So, in terms of social media, we do everything ourselves and don’t actually use any tools for that. I know there are some good ones out there.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And all right, so after that initial success, within a week you launched a Shopify store and you started selling on that store. At that time, how were you driving traffic? Was it just redirecting everybody from Instagram and sending them to the Shopify store to purchase?
Rory Westbrook: Exactly. Yeah, so it was just Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but as I mentioned earlier, Instagram took more of a lead in terms of how that was performing. So, yeah, just following customers. We did competitions, as well, for people to win store credit or win clothes. That helped us gain again, a lot of new followers, and what we did was sort of daily posts on social media to drive people back to the website. And another thing that I did early on, within the first week of building the website, was to make sure that we sort of drip fed our stock, so that we had new stock every day, and that’s something that we still do to this day, and I think that’s why we get customers coming back, and there’s a lot of excitement around our brand, is that whenever you come back to the website that next day, there’s hundreds of new products added, so that’s one of the main things that we did.
Kurt Elster: I’ve noticed on the website it says at the bottom… Let’s see. “We list a minimum of 100 retro clothing items every morning.” So, 100 new products get listed on this site every day.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so that’s… We’re now to listing 150 unique products, new products, every day, and we’re going to look to upscale that soon, but yeah, it’s lots of hands on, making sure that everything’s listed on the back end of Shopify and all the stock’s processed, and we list it, so it’s over a thousand new items every week, so we got a lot of stock coming in and out.
Kurt Elster: And you’ve also got, I see you also sell a mystery box. The two things that stand out to me here are… Or the thing that stands out to me about these two things is novelty, right? So, you’ve got every day, 150 new items. Wow. Maybe I’ll find the one amazing piece in that. And each of these, I assume you don’t have multiple. You have one or a few, right?
Rory Westbrook: Everything’s unique, one of one, and it only comes in that one size, so yeah, it’s sort of potluck for our customers when they come on if they see something they like, and they hope it’s in their size, so yeah, there’s a lot of sort of excitement when customers see something and they know it won’t hang around for long. So, most of our items sell within the first 24 to 48 hours.
Kurt Elster: And then looking at the site, it’s really the product listings, the photographs, everything is really professional and really consistent. What does the workflow look like to list 150 items every single day and do it in this professional, consistent manner?
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so it’s something that we’ve been working hard on to see if we can streamline any of those processes, and it’s very manual. Sort of every item that comes in has to be processed in terms of being washed, measured, and then we picture it, then we list it to Shopify, and we tag it. So, it’s a very manual process and I think we’re pretty much as quick as we can be on that now. We’ve had a few years to practice it, but yeah, it’s sort of that’s a full-time job for a few people in our team, to just constantly be updating the inventory and adding new stock.
Kurt Elster: And then for the other challenge with it is not just listing it, is acquiring it. I mean, it’s one thing to say I can go to a manufacturer and say, “All right, I need 100 units of this.” And then, “All right, I’m down to 10. I could reorder.” You don’t have that luxury. You are constantly repurchasing, repurchasing, repurchasing. How do you… That’s very different than drop shipping or manufacturing. How do you even go about doing that? Do you have a network of people combing vintage stores? What’s the high-level overview here?
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so we’ve got a number of suppliers that work for us worldwide, and they are constantly on the search for stock for us, and we have calls with suppliers every single day to make sure that we’ve got stock coming in, and something that we stay on top of to make sure that we don’t run out. But yeah, they work really, really hard around the clock for us to make sure that we can get the types of vintage that we’re after.
Kurt Elster: And what’s nice about this business is it is… It’s very much environmentally friendly. You are taking stuff and keeping it out of a landfill. You are reselling used clothes, vintage clothing. How do you think that’s impacted the business? Do you think that’s added any value to the brand?
Rory Westbrook: Definitely. Yeah. Lots of our customers are very conscious of that, and I think sustainable fashion is definitely becoming more of an important thing to consumers, so not only is vintage clothing sort of you’re saving the planet, not sort of promoting fast fashion, people wearing something once and throwing it away. We’ve got an abundance of clothing that’s in really good condition and can be worn and worn again, and not only that, won’t… Vintage clothing, something else that’s great is you can wear it and it holds its value. You can then sell it on for the same amount, rather than brand new clothing, as soon as you put it on, more or less it halves in value.
So, yeah, there’s a few things that are great with vintage fashion, as well as the rarity of not likely to see someone else in the same thing as you. That’s something our customers like. But ultimately, it’s something that’s becoming more and more important, and something we’re really glad about is the sustainability factor.
Kurt Elster: And over time, how has marketing the brand changed? You had mentioned like blogs, influencers, I see you’re doing some brand collaborations. Talk to me about marketing the brand now in 2020.
Rory Westbrook: So, we’re doing a number of things. We’re still, as I mentioned earlier, pushing Instagram as our main tool, and looking to grow that, so we do adverts on Instagram and Facebook. We also push Google, and we’re looking to start doing YouTube ads, as well, so that’s our sort of main marketing, that paid advertisement, but social media as well is our main tool, so we work really word on that to make sure that we’ve got new content going live every single day. We post to our customers at least sort of 20 times a day on the story and a few times on our feeds, just to show new products that have come in, and if we’re promoting anything like sales or new collections. But ultimately, because we’ve got new stock coming in every day, it’s easy for us to find content around that and keep updating our customers. So, that’s another great tool that we use to get our customers back to the website.
Email marketing is something that performs really well for us. And as of recently, we launched an app last year, and the push notifications is allowing us to engage and market our customers to a far better level than we’ve experienced, so they’re our main tools for marketing.
Kurt Elster: And so, you’ve got a native app, so like there’s an iOS app or an Android app I could download that’s called True Vintage, and then I could shop the site. And that allows people to get push notifications for these new products, so for this… I mean, all of these products are one of one, so as limited as it gets, so the push notification factor becomes a real value add for people. The one thing I’ve noticed that could be difficult with when you build an app is getting people to install it initially. How have you gone about promoting your native app to your customers?
Rory Westbrook: So, the native app is actually, if we rewind about a year, before we looked to launch this, we had 80% of our traffic coming through a mobile device, and we had countless requests from customers to launch an app, so that we could optimize that shopping experience for them. So, it was yeah, great success really quickly in terms of how many people we got to download the app, and in terms of the revenue that came in, so it now makes up a third of our total revenue and it’s something that we push a lot to our customers, offering discounts, flash sales, and early access to products to download the app. Yeah, that’s one of the main things that we do, and it’s been a great tool for us.
Yeah, we’re growing sort of thousands of downloads every month, but ultimately the way that people… that we get our customers to download the app would be letting them know that it’s a much better shopping experience, that they can check out quicker, they can find products quicker, it responds far better than the mobile website, so we mention that on our email marketing. We mention it on social channels, as well. And also, at the top of the website we’ve got a mobile banner which links to the app, so that customers are aware if they come onto the mobile website that there’s an app there, ready for them to download. So, those are a few of the main ones, and the other one I mentioned earlier is just offering something different on your app, which you don’t do on your mobile website. So, what we push on the True Vintage app is regular discounts or flash sales which are only available to people with the app.
Kurt Elster: So, you do exclusives in the app, I think is what drives the value. It has to have its own special thing.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, that’s how we recommend driving downloads, that it does something that your mobile website doesn’t, and is different in some way, so flash sales is a great way to get your customers over to the app.
Kurt Elster: So, in addition to… You’ve got an app. We could consider that an additional channel, or an integration, or an extension of the website. We talked a little bit about tools. What are some of the other tools, apps, integrations you can’t live without? What are the best tools in your toolbox for Shopify?
Rory Westbrook: So, we’ve got Klaviyo. That’s been amazing for us and we’ve got that coming up to two years ago now we installed Klaviyo, and it’s been amazing for us in terms of email marketing and driving customers back to the website. And it’s a great additional revenue stream. We weren’t doing much on email marketing before, so that really helped transform our business. That was, yeah, one of our favorite integrations.
We’ve also got LoyaltyLion, yeah, the loyalty scheme, and that’s great at bringing customers back to the site and improving brand loyalty. And the third integration is Shoppex, and what I touched on earlier about building our mobile app, that was actually a software that we built for ourselves, so sort of on the back of its success of how good it was for True Vintage, I actually launched a new business where we now build mobile apps for other Shopify stores. So, that’s, yeah, the three main integrations that we can’t live without.
Kurt Elster: So, talk to me about Shoppex. There’s other apps. There are other services and apps that will build, that will do the same thing. They’ll help you build a native app for your store. Devil’s advocate, why not use one of those? What drove you to build your own tool?
Rory Westbrook: So, there’s a few out there. There’s not many out there, but it’s definitely something that’s needed for the Shopify stores, and how we differ from anyone on the market is in terms of our customization level. So, all brand and Shopify stores are sort of unique and have different wants and needs, so instead of what’s out there on the market at the moment, which is just plug and play, and you sort of use the platform that’s there, we look to build the app around your business. So, any integrations that you have we can partner with, and any additional features that you want, we can customize. So, we do have sort of your standard packages where it’s plug and play and we can adapt that for you, or we do fully bespoke apps. But ultimately, we can customize to fit around your business.
Kurt Elster: So, walk me through the price range. If I want something off the shelf, just say, “Hey, my store is just a store. There’s nothing weird. Turn that into an app.” Versus, “All right, I need this very bespoke thing.”
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so we’ve got four packages. Our starter one is called Growth, and that’s 99 pounds a month or $129, so that’s for your smaller stores who are looking to launch an app. It’s still got the wish list, and the Apple Pay, and push notifications. But yeah, for more advanced stores, if you’re looking to customize your font and you want advanced app analytics, then we charge a bit more on a premium package, and then we go around to the enterprise package, and here we provide a campaign manager for you, who will set up all of the automated push notifications to help drive revenue for your app and ultimately bring people back towards your app. We also have multicurrency, unlimited product listings as well in there.
But yeah, ultimately we help you guys drive revenue, and we can build any automated campaigns that you want, so we set up a welcome series, a win back series if someone hasn’t been on the app for a while. We can go into as much detail as if a customer’s looking at certain collections on your app regularly, we can engage with them, as well. So, those are the three packages, and then what I mentioned earlier, a fully bespoke. So, if someone wants an app with high level of customization or they’ve got multiple Shopify stores, then we would put them on a bespoke package.
Kurt Elster: Cool. Let’s see what we got here. Looking back at 2019, what was the most successful thing you did for your store? For your brand?
Rory Westbrook: So, the beginning of 2019 we looked at improving the mobile experience, so we built a whole new mobile website, something I mentioned earlier is just the sheer volume of traffic that’s coming from a mobile device. It was at 80% and that’s actually increasing day by day. So, we did a whole rehaul of the website, and that’s one of the biggest challenges over the past sort of two years is thinking mobile first, which as sort of buying habits change and more people are shopping mobile device, it’s something you have to think about, and actually designing everything mobile first, rather than desktop.
So, we did a rehaul of the website, and now that’s looking great and performing much better, and then we also launched the app, which I mentioned earlier.
Kurt Elster: I think especially like where a core, your core audience, your highest converting channel, traffic acquisition channel, is Instagram, which is almost exclusively mobile, it makes so much sense for this brand to have this mobile-first site. I’m looking at it on desktop right now and it is phenomenal on desktop, as well. What do you think are the… When we talk about, all right, mobile first, and we rebuilt it on mobile, and it’s better on mobile, what were the stumbling blocks? What is it that makes it perform so much better on mobile? What do you think? Where do you think people are going wrong here?
Rory Westbrook: In terms of how we’ve improved our mobile website? Is that what you mean?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Rory Westbrook: So, typically what we would… The problem that we were doing is we were looking at desktop first, and then we were having… It was converting the website onto mobile devices, so it wasn’t optimized. We had issues with the menu not being responsive, and even simple things, text not being sort of readable. So, by stripping that back and then really looking at the mobile design first, and that being the most important design, we spent much more time on making sure that was optimized. So, just simple things, really, making sure that was optimized, and running quickly, and no bugs.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and you said you work with influencers. Especially in fashion, and someone who’s very Instagram forward, you said you started to work with influencers, you started to work with YouTubers. How has your influencer experience been? Because it seems to be very hit or miss for people.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so it’s only something we do a bit of, to be honest, and it can be hit or miss, but mainly for us, because we are selling unique items that are one of ones, then if we send something to an influencer and they post that to their following, saying, “Look at this. Look at this item I’ve got from True Vintage.” The problem is is that no one can then go on and order that exact same product, which looks great in the influencer’s picture. So, something that we have to work around is trying to give influencers sort of a brand or product type that we’ve got lots of, so at least we’ve got something similar, or we do do a range of new accessories, where we’ve got multiples of, and that works much better for us, that we can directly sell that exact product.
Kurt Elster: So, you do… Well, diverging a little bit from that, so you do… Occasionally, you find like a lot of new old stock, where you could sell a few dozen of something?
Rory Westbrook: Very occasionally, but what I was touching on is if we do give out clothing to an influencer, to make sure that we’ve at least got similar products from that brand, for example.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Rory Westbrook: And that’s when it works a bit better for us.
Kurt Elster: Oh man, I mean, this whole time I’ve been cruising through the True Vintage website, and to my surprise, the exciting one, there’s vintage Carhartt stuff in here.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, we’ve got that. Have you bought anything yet?
Kurt Elster: No, I have not purchased anything yet, but only because since it’s all one of one, the items I’ve liked weren’t in my size. You’re right, it’s very much like a… There’s the joy of discovery here, where you have to cruise through and find something that is like both that you like and is in your size. I can see where people start, were they build ahead, they start with, “Okay, this is cool. I see the potential. I’ll sign up for the newsletter or I’ll follow them.” And then they start checking it, and then they start checking it more, and now it becomes a habit, and it starts to be like your brand, and shopping your site, and seeing what you have becomes part of their daily life.
And so, that really is a tremendous advantage that you have over other brands that could just sell stuff. And every product, there is implied scarcity there, so it’s like if you see it and you like it, you better buy it, or it’s not gonna be there tomorrow. Whereas with other brands, it’s like, “Oh, well, they could restock it, or I have time. I can wait.” This is very different experience.
Rory Westbrook: Exactly. Yeah, or they can find that product elsewhere on another retailer’s website, whereas with us, yeah, it’s unique.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Rory Westbrook: Once they see it, they’ll probably buy it if they like it.
Kurt Elster: So, if you went back in time, what would you have done differently? Just one thing. What would you go back and tell yourself if you had to start over?
Rory Westbrook: I think if I were to start over, I would try to scale the business quicker. So, I mean we’ve done a tremendous job already, and I’m definitely very happy where the business is, but when I started six years ago, there were very few competitors in the market, so I feel like there was more of an opportunity to get the business growing at a far quicker rate. Now there’s lots of competitors in the market. There’s low barriers to entry with vintage clothing. Yeah, I would say just trying to grow it quicker, to be honest.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah. At the same time, hindsight’s 20/20. You know it becomes successful, so it’s easy to go back and say I’d be like, “Throw the money at it! Just spend it!” Whereas at that time, you really don’t… It’s an investment. And all marketing is investment, and all investments carry risk, so you can’t beat yourself up over being a little conservative about growing it. And certainly, you got to an incredible place. I mean, at this time, I see in my notes here you did… You’ve consistently doubled annual revenue year over year for five years. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially in a space where you can’t just invent product. You have to go find these one-off pieces. It really… It boggles my mind.
It’s a incredible business you’ve built. And then on top of it, you did it while in school.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah. Yeah. It was hard work, but yeah, we’ve done well to definitely double our revenue year on year, and we are looking to… Obviously, that’s getting harder and harder now. Now we’re getting to a bigger size, but something we’re going to continue to try and do. And yeah, it’s been a fun journey so far.
Kurt Elster: And you still graduated university, right?
Rory Westbrook: I did. Yes. I still graduated. I’ve got my 2:1 and I was pretty much running the business full time, and university took more of a backseat, but I’m glad I passed it and then could concentrate on growing the business.
Kurt Elster: Again, when you saw the incredible success here, were you ever tempted to quit? I mean, like famously, a lot of Silicon Valley people are dropouts of Ivy League schools, and there’s been, especially in America, because of student debt, there’s been a backlash against higher education. I’ve got a master’s degree and I don’t know that I would… It was expensive, and I was lucky to afford it, but I don’t know that I would recommend the same path for people today. Were you tempted to quit? Did you have dark moments where you’re like, “Why am I even bothering?”
Rory Westbrook: I thought about it a few times, but the business wasn’t quite big enough at the time that I knew it was going to turn into the size it is today, so it would have been a bit risky for me to drop out, plus I thought that I could still get by running the business full time and university taking a backseat, and I would still pass. And I had my brother working with me at that point. He joined the business early on. And yeah, without his help I probably would have struggled to juggle the two, so I was very obviously grateful that he was helping me out.
Kurt Elster: Well, congratulations on both completing school and on the tremendous success with this business. I have here that you have, for Shoppex, your app, the eCommerce app service you’re running, I’ve got a note here saying you have a special offer for our listeners.
Rory Westbrook: Yes, we’ve got a special offer for your podcast listeners, so if anyone’s looking at launching their own native app for their Shopify store, or in fact if they are on a different eCommerce platform, we can still cater for them. But if they book in on our website, so Shoppex.co, that’s S-H-O-P-P-E-X.co, and there’s a book a demo on the website. If they quote PODCAST, we are offering 20% off the annual subscription.
Kurt Elster: Very good. That’s a pretty good discount. Nothing to sneeze at. I will include that in the show notes for folks, so they know. Where can people go to learn more about you.
Rory Westbrook: To learn about Shoppex?
Kurt Elster: To learn about anybody. I want to know about True Vintage. I want to know about Shoppex. I want to know about Rory.
Rory Westbrook: Yeah, so for True Vintage, you can find us on our website, truevintage.com, and on Instagram well, @truevintage, so check that out. And also our app, just True Vintage again in the app store and you’ll find us on there. And yeah, follow the details for Shoppex. It’s shoppex.co, and everything’s on our website and you can give us an email if you want to find out more about launching an app.
Kurt Elster: Very good. All right. I will link to all of that in the show notes. Tap or swipe up on the art on your phone to get to that quickly. And Rory, thank you. This has been inspiring and enlightening. I appreciate it.
Rory Westbrook: Thank you very much.