Meet Brisbane’s homegrown fashion success story
Her experience being treated as an “unworthy” customer in an upmarket James St store drove Sarah Timmerman to start her own online business. Now, she runs a global brand shipping to 40 countries.
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She owns one of Australia’s pioneering online fashion retailers, shipping more than 20,000 packages a month to customers in 70 countries around the world, but you wouldn’t know it standing in Sarah Timmerman’s minimal – some may say sparse – wardrobe in her east Brisbane home.
The founder of hugely successful Brisbane-based, global brand Beginning Boutique has just seven blazers – something she describes as “a lot”, a few other jackets, jumpers, a short stack of jeans, a clutch of shirts and a handful of dresses within the dark timber, walk-in space.
It’s decidedly modest for someone with an endless arsenal of clothes at her disposal, but maybe it’s because the CEO says a love of fashion is not actually what drove her to start her multimillion-dollar apparel empire.
Rather, it was the sheer desire to bring people “joy” that turned the kid who spent her holidays mustering cattle on her family’s property in Boonah, west of the Gold Coast, into an Aussie fashion mogul.
“I love the idea that we can bring joy,” says the 37 year old, revealing she keeps her wardrobe somewhat exiguous by donating many items to family and friends, particularly her niece. “With clothes, I really just enjoyed the capability that an outfit has to give you a different emotion.”
In fact, the online business grew out of her own unpleasant shopping experiences in Brisbane’s James St in the early 2000s, when staff in trendy designer stores would make her feel unworthy of being a customer. “The staff were there to show you that they were the boss … and I really wanted to develop something that gave people that experience of exclusivity but also joy and respect,” she says.
Inspiring that concept was a trip to Paris for her 21st birthday, when she stumbled into a retailer selling the coolest products of the day, from iPods and CDs to jars and glassware, with exceptional customer service in which the staff took a personal interest in every patron.
On the plane back from Paris she immediately began planning her dream store – a clothing shop selling first collections from the hottest, young, up-and-coming Australian designers combined with extraordinary service.
She returned to James St – believing it to be Brisbane’s premium fashion destination – and scoured for a potential bricks-and-mortar tenancy. But with no sites available she decided to launch online at the recommendation of a friend.
With a loan from her mum, who owned a major logistics company, she spent $40,000 creating a website – “one of my worst decisions ever” as it never worked properly; ordered $30,000 in stock, bought some lights from Bunnings and a mannequin, and launched Beginning Boutique in 2008 in the second bedroom of her mother’s house in Forest Lake, in the city’s southwest.
With her motto to “bring joy”, each purchase would be packed with a handwritten note of appreciation, as well as lollies or chocolates.
Meanwhile to drum up business, Timmerman would hold events at the house with family and friends to show off new stock, run stalls at the UQ student markets, send out leaflets in local advertising directories and run competitions on Facebook.
“I did everything you could possibly think of to get attention because back then, online fashion wasn’t really a thing,” she says, relying on her husband Maarten, who she married at age 20, to support the pair with his salary from working as a welder.
But after two years of the business losing money, she decided she needed to connect better with her customers and launched a pop-up store in Brisbane’s South Bank.
Local TAFE students fast became her biggest clientele, and with their limited budgets and the carnage continuing from the GFC at the time, she decided to switch from expensive designer stock to more affordable labels. The change worked and after six months she had enough money to have her dodgy website remade, close the pop-up and focus, once again, on online.
“I wanted to stay online because I believed that’s where the future was going,” says Timmerman, with Beginning Boutique now selling its own unique designs, as well as wares from other brands including Dr Martens, Lioness and Thrills.
Propelling the business into the global phenomenon it has now become was its quick-response customer service and its fast uptake of social media, starting with Facebook, and moving on to Instagram and Pinterest and now TikTok. Beginning Boutique has about two million followers across all platforms and was one of the first clothing companies in Australia to use influencers.
Timmerman began by renting a house in Byron Bay in 2015 for music festival Splendour in the Grass and inviting influencers in to try on clothing and have their make-up done while she and a friend poured drinks, delivering a fun, interactive experience that would be the perfect spot to create content.
“I thought what if we could give them an absolutely incredible experience that they wouldn’t necessarily have, but dress them and be able to get the photos for our socials,” she says. The idea was a triumph, so much so she did it again with global music festival Coachella in the US in 2018, flying influencers into Palm Springs to wear BB’s latest collections and share the looks with their followers.
The strategy soon became the business’s most successful annual marketing campaign.
But just as the brand was gearing up for its largest Coachella extravaganza on record in 2020, Covid hit and the music festival was cancelled.
“We had literally just spent the biggest amount of money ever on a photo shoot. We had a ridiculous spend on houses and flights and massive amounts of investment into what was usually our poster event of the year and we just had to figure out another way to sell those clothes because you can’t send them back,” Timmerman recalls, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the “devastating” situation.
The team jumped into action, restyling pieces and recreating looks to make them more casual for the changing conditions, while also targeting shoppers in American states like Florida, which didn’t have lockdowns.
The company also introduced elements of fleece and knitwear into its usually party-driven fashion ranges to appeal to those stuck at home.
“The plan was just to keep figuring it out day by day, which sounds shortsighted, but in a time where you literally go from having sales to having nothing – no sales – you can’t plan for more than a day or a week ahead,” she says. While Timmerman admits it was the most difficult time in the business’s history, forcing her to cut costs wherever she could and stop taking a wage, she says it also helped the business boom in the US as the team fiercely chased new markets in the region.
That momentum will now see the brand launch its first store in America this year, which will double as the business’s first proper shop in the world, with currently its only bricks and mortar outlet tucked inside the warehouse in Lytton in Brisbane’s east.
The new 300sq m tenancy will be in San Diego, in southern California, which is home to the brand’s highest number of orders. The shop will also enable the business to solve one of its biggest problems. “We really needed to be able to process our returns and our customer care faster,” Timmerman says.
“So we decided we could do that better and it can be a store as well as processing.”
And if the store is successful, Timmerman says it will be the first of many for the US.
Critical to its performance, however, will be the outlet’s ability to deliver great customer service and maintain Timmerman’s motto of bringing “joy” to shoppers.
“I’ve always thought if someone’s going to buy my dress, it should be the best experience they could ever have for their dollars because why choose me over anyone else? We should value and respect that money that’s coming into our business,” she says, insisting she has picked a terrific team to run the American branch.
“We have customers open their package and it says, ‘You’re loved’ or ‘I hope you’ll enjoy this’, you know, something nice or a compliment on the card and they email and tell us that they were having the worst day and then they got that and it’s so simple, but it just changes lives and it’s important to put a positive impact into the world.”
Putting a positive impact into the CEO’s own world is her family.
The mother of two, Finn, 7, and James, 5, says parenthood completely changed her from the relentless go-getter, who first developed a taste for money and working as a child washing cars for neighbours and friends and helping with filing for her parents’ business, to becoming a more empathetic boss and leader.
“When you’re a really driven person, you can forget that there is so much more to life than work and while I love work, I get so much joy from work, I get my purpose from work, there is so much more and sometimes it takes a huge life experience to think differently,” she says.
That change of thinking didn’t happen overnight, however.
As a person who thrives on routine, Timmerman reveals she would program her first born’s feeds, sleeps and poos into an app and would tick them off like it was a work checklist.
It is for this reason her husband Maarten is now the stay-at-home dad, after a stint working as Beginning Boutique’s head of e-commerce.
“Maarten’s way more chilled. He’s way more relaxed and I think that’s a great experience for a kid rather than an uptight mum, well, an uptight me,” she says.
While she’s the working parent, she says her goal this year has been to connect with her children daily, although she believes that the notion that one can have it all and achieve balance is a fallacy.
“I just don’t think there’s any such thing as balance to be honest,” she says.
The thing that I am working the hardest on right now is being present.”
Helping her do that is her lifelong habit of journaling. Timmerman says she has been writing down her daily thoughts and gratitudes long before the practice became a current trend, with a stash of about 15 paper journals hidden in her wardrobe at home. She has now converted to an iPad.
She says the practice helps ground her and ensures she focuses on her goals.
“I need to journal in the morning, read in the morning, exercise in the morning and then at night I need to be by myself,” she says. “I like to have a little bit of time alone, even if it’s just 10 minutes to journal and just to think and to process. And by managing my time in that way, it allows me to stay in a pretty healthy space.”
She is also a believer in vision boards, however, she says they are not about fantastical materialistic “things”, but a way to plan to achieve your dreams.
“Let’s say it’s a fancy car you want, it’s like, ‘OK, well I’m going to need to earn this much a week to be able to pay for that fancy car … and then you know how much you need to earn, and you go, ‘OK, so to earn that I’ll need to have this type of job,’ so then you need to educate yourself or change things.
“I think it’s just planning really,” she says.
So what’s on Timmerman’s vision board?
Taking pride of place is the launch of the first US store, next to the goal to work only four days a week so she can spend more time with her family – although she admits “that’s been on there for a long time”.
Also at the top is to engage in more great storytelling using collaborations with influencers.
“I think working with influencers, as long as it’s a great partnership and as long as you’re fully aligned, it can do amazing things for both brands,” she says, having teamed up with global social media stars to launch sellout, one-off clothing collections.
Giving back to other business women is another key goal for Timmerman, who created the Business Besties program, providing up-and-coming female entrepreneurs with advice and mentorship from some of Queensland’s most successful lady founders, including Georgie Stevenson from Naked Harvest and Karina Irby from Moana Bikini.
“We are passionate about ensuring that we are making a difference,” she says.
“I wish I had had mentors earlier on because the amount of money I would have saved and things that would have been different.”
But what will always remain the main vision for Timmerman is bringing joy to customers and great service.
“It’s looking at what we can do for customers better and faster and making things even more enjoyable for them,” she says.
“How can we make this dress better? How can we make this experience
better? How can we connect better with people? I think it’s just a continuous improvement.” ■
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