![]() ![]() What also helps sales is the enviable lifestyle Lu flaunts on social media: (her Instagram account) is rife with colourful cocktails, bare midriffs and European travel adventures, while the Showpo Instagram posts are also carefully crafted. “That’s how they pick the winners,” she says, smiling. “We know what prints, shapes, patterns, and so on the girls are buying,” but she is quick to add that her team has a natural flair and an eye for fashion, too. “We’ve got, like, 13 or 15 people on our product side: the buying team,” says Lu. ![]() With its seven years of online sales, Showpo has racked up a valuable trove of data on what sells and what doesn’t. "You can't ever trust what you're doing now is going to work in a few months' time" The groovy, girly aesthetic, which she admits “kind of all just happened by accident”, clearly works – although Showpo’s healthy revenue figure would indicate that Lu is quite strategic about what she sells. There’s a best-selling item – but she won’t tell me what it is. The affordable dresses, must-have floral playsuits and party rompers with names like Caught My Eyes and Felt So Right are aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds and made in China, with Lu’s wholesale suppliers based in Sydney. As well as women’s fashion and beauty items, all priced at less than A$100, Showpo sells homewares, pet accessories, inflatable pool toys and reuseable cups for takeaway coffee. The former KPMG cadet and EY analyst founded online fashion hub Showpo when she was A$60,000 in debt. Her online fashion empire turned over more than A$30 million in sales in 2017 – impressive for a business founded in her parents’ garage only seven years earlier. Lu could be forgiven for having a little fun: with less than three weeks until Christmas, most of Sydney was wrapped up in the silly season. As with everything Lu does, she’d gone in hard: the tagline on her Instagram account, thelazyceo, is “work hard, play hard, more wine, less whine” and, as if to prove it, she’d posted a photo of herself and Durkin behind the DJ decks, Lu looking glam in tight jeans and a midriff shirt – champagne in hand. Lu, 31, and her business partner and part-time mentor Alex Durkin, 28, had spent the previous evening at a networking event held by the National Online Retailers Association. ![]() On a hot summer’s day in December 2017, Jane Lu was sitting with her feet up on a table in the Showpo offices in Sydney, feeling a little worse for wear. Jane Lu's fashion webite Showpo is a lean machine powered by social media and more than A$30 million in annual sales - not a bad result for a 31-year-old corporate dropout. ![]()
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