Decjuba boss Tania Austin is the Melbourne mum who has become one of Australia’s richest women
SHE may not be a household name, but this Melbourne mother of three is behind some of our biggest and fastest-growing fashion brands — and one of Australia’s richest women.
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TANIA Austin is one of the richest women in Australia, but very few people would know who she is by name or face — and that’s just the way she likes it.
The owner of fast-growing fashion label Decjuba lives in Melbourne but flies under the radar, preferring to spend downtime at home with her three children, three dogs and guinea pig, than attend glamour VIP events around town.
With an estimated fortune of more than $56 million, Austin, 46, is in the top 30 richest women in Australia but you wouldn’t know it when you meet her.
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There’s no pretension, there is no team of minders (just one personal assistant) and she’s warm, passionate, engaging and funny.
There are no permanent staff at home either. As we walk into her modest but cool and contemporary Cremorne office, Austin hands her mobile phone to her assistant just in case one of the kids calls while we’re chatting. It’s late afternoon and they’re home from school and helping get dinner started.
“They’re too old for a nanny,” she says.
Austin has built Decjuba from a fledgling fashion brand with five stores in 2008 to fast approaching 100 stores and a booming online business in Australia and New Zealand.
In July, she celebrates 10 years in the business.
It’s no small feat at a time when retail in general is struggling and Australian fashion labels are sadly closing at a rapid rate.
She has 936 employees, three of whom are men, and refers constantly to the importance of “the team” and the satisfaction she gets from helping guide them to reach their own potential.
“I don’t do a lot of media because this business isn’t about me, I don’t ever want it to be about me,” Austin says.
“One of the drivers I have is about seeing people reach their potential and reach their potential when they don’t even know what that is.
“People say, ‘You must love the travel and you’re in fashion, that's so exciting’, but one of the things I love the most and what drives me is pushing and challenging other people and seeing them grow. It’s one of the things that satisfies who I am.”
Austin made her initial fortune as co-founder of Geelong-based, globally successful brand Cotton On with ex-husband Nigel Austin.
The couple, who have three children, Sky, 15, Jett, 12, and Zane, 11, split just over 10 years ago.
She decided she needed to step away from the rapidly growing Cotton On Group (then with 400 stores) and make a fresh start as a single mum.
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“It couldn’t go on the way it was going on and something had to change,” she says.
“At the time it was the right thing to do and it wasn’t hard, it was like any other chapter in your life.”
With three young children and a $50 million fortune from Cotton On, Austin, then 36, could easily have been forgiven for taking time out to focus on her family and maybe dabble in some small hobbies.
While family comes first and foremost, Austin says its not in her DNA to do nothing. There was only a six-month break between leaving Cotton On and buying Decjuba.
“I needed to throw myself back into something. I’d been doing that for so long, it would have been a void not to have it,” she says.
But it was baby steps in the beginning.
“I had three little kids, they were 1, 3 and 5 at the time and they were really little,” she says. “I thought, ‘What is it I can do that can be different from what I’ve done and fill that void of what I’m used to doing, but do it differently?’
“Buying into an existing brand was a different challenge for me. We had five stores when I bought the brand, I thought, ‘That's OK. My kids are really little, I can just slowly let it evolve and make sure we get all the right practices in place.’
“It was a conscious decision to go into a different type of product, having been in really high-volume fast fashion and at a much lower price point (at Cotton On). I was getting older so I wanted to do something around what I wanted to wear as I got older. Quality was a big part of that and becoming a more conscious consumer as well.”
“I wanted something that lasted as well, wasn’t so trend and fad-driven, things that mixed and matched and went together so it was a bit of journey to get all those things together.”
Austin says in many ways she had to relearn elements of building a successful business.
“We had well over 400 stores when we separated, so it was quite a different business as opposed to five stores, but it was fun and refreshing,” she says.
Rather than resting on her laurels and former success, she relished throwing herself back in at the beginning.
“It was nice to go back and relearn those fundamental basics about what makes a business tick, it was really cool — to focus on the small stuff, because if you’ve got no time for the small stuff, then forget about the big stuff,” she says.
“People only want to come in and do the big stuff. If you can’t nail the small stuff, then give it up.”
While some may say she’s pitting herself against her ex-husband in the highly competitive world of fashion, Austin says the Decjuba brand is different to Cotton On on many levels.
“Of course Cotton On does T-shirts and Decjuba does T-shirts, but our target market is different and I have a genuine desire to do something different,” she says.
“That’s their space and they own it.
“We did a cracking job setting that up. It’s a completely different space that we play in.”
While Austin admits it can be a struggle to juggle family with work commitments at times, Nigel lives close by and she is surrounded by close and supportive friends.
“As a single mum, that's the most important thing in the world to me, that the kids get what they need,” Austin says.
“I don’t have any family here. I’m originally from Perth so that can be tricky.
“I’ve got an amazing network of friends who are like pseudo aunties and uncles and their husbands have been amazing for my kids as well.”
With two exceptionally wealthy and successful parents (Nigel featured last year on the BRW Rich List with an estimated personal fortune of $295 million), the children could have access to anything and everything they could ever want, but Austin says she and Nigel are conscious of raising happy, well-adjusted and grounded kids.
“They’re very exposed, not only by what we do at Decjuba, but with our own personal life around what we do philanthropically and that’s been an ongoing decision both Nigel and I made many years ago,” Austin says.
Decjuba has a longstanding partnership with The Hunger Project, a not-for-profit organisation committed to the empowerment of women and ending hunger globally by 2030.
The Cotton On Foundation is dedicated to empowering youth globally. By working directly with communities in southern Uganda, South Africa, Thailand and Australia it hopes to create 20,000 educational places by 2020.
“They’ve been very exposed to that, how we can impact that and what we can do to give back,” Austin says.
“It’s little things like they’ve got their own World Vision pen pal, which is great, and we were looking on the World Vision site, my son was sending off an email to his pen pal. As part of that, it flicks up all the other things you can do and my daughter saw they were raising money for Water Day.
“She said, ‘I can do that, a 6km run’. Completely on her own she organised that and raised $4000. It wasn’t on an organised day, it was a walk for water, 6km, which is the average distance they have to walk in undeveloped countries to get fresh water.
“She did that and I think through seeing the things I’ve done they get that base understanding that the world is actually bigger, there are bigger problems than the ones we’re facing and you know we’re in a position where we need to be really aware of that.”
Austin admits there are times when she doesn’t keep all the balls perfectly flying through the air, but keeping it real and sharing those less-than-perfect moments with her kids is also part of teaching them about real life.
“My children, they hear the full gamut of everything. It’s OK to have bad days, it’s OK to come to work looking less than stellar, we’re not perfect and we’re not going to be perfect.
“I don’t labour over small stuff. It’s OK if the dishwasher didn’t get unpacked today. Give yourself permission not to be perfect at everything.”
While she may not be perfect at everything, Austin clearly has a knack for building successful fashion brands and a sincere passion for giving back.
“The great part about having a business and growing a business is getting it to a point where it can have a real impact and that's what we were doing at Cotton On as well,” she says.
“We talk about that here, about how important it is to nail what we do well because that’s when we get to do the cool stuff, to have the impact to do the things like The Hunger Project and start to give back in various ways. That’s the really cool stuff.”
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