Teenage eBay mogul goes from handbag seller to Silicon Valley wonderkid

WHEN she was just 14 Holly Cardew, a schoolgirl from regional Australia, started selling handbags online. Now she’s a stunning success.

Holly Cardew from PixC is taking Silicon Valley by storm.

AT 14 years old, a schoolgirl from regional NSW started asking a friend living in France to send her designer handbags to sell on eBay.

Holly Cardew paid warehouse prices of less than $100 for the Longchamp bags before flogging them to Australians at a fraction of what they cost at David Jones, and still making a tidy profit.

Now 29, the former teenage entrepreneur from Orange is a key member of Silicon Valley’s Aussie mafia, helping other small online retailers to shift their products with a photo editing service.

The graphic designer grew up at the perfect time to exploit the rising tide of the internet marketplace, quickly identifying it as a fast-growing niche area. And she admits it was addictive. “I did sell a lot on eBay, anything I could find around the house,” she told news.com.au. “DVDs, books ... I’d think, I could sell this, no one’s using it.”

When Holly realised other small businesses needed help selling online, she set up an agency called Country and Co to sell products from regional Australia to urban centres. But it wasn’t enough for the ambitious young woman, who saw a major gap in the market. She realised how few of her sellers were able to edit their photos to look attractive to customers, cut out on a clean white background.

Holly Cardew is taking Silicon Valley by storm.

“Now more than ever, it’s easy to set up a site, you don’t need to be able to code,” she said. “You can find a customer on Instagram and build that up through a website. Instagram, Facebook and eBay are really good because they’ve already got traffic.

“I thought, why can’t you take a photo with your phone and have it look amazing? I knew it was part of a bigger problem.”

She says another motivation for founding her company, PixC, was to provide the service to anyone at a reasonable price. “I’m a visual person. I like to build and create things. You can build a website on Shopify in two days, so the fact people are selling that for $1200 is crazy.”

Holly didn’t know how to code when she started, building a very simple website with just her name, email address, a Dropbox link and a promise to edit customers’ photos in 24 hours.

Today, PixC has customers in 30 countries and Holly divides her time between Sydney and San Francisco. She was named in the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for retail and eCommerce in Asia.

She believes the main difference between Australia and the US is that entrepreneurs can be too “modest” over here. “There’s companies in Silicon Valley mining the moon. If someone in Australia you were doing that, they’d think you were crazy.

Holly Cardew from PixC is taking Silicon Valley by storm.

“Yes, start small, get traction, but when people say ‘think big’, think 10 times as big. I always say, imagine you have $100 million, what would you do?”

She says Australia has the better lifestyle, healthcare, childcare — but what it needs is experienced entrepreneurs who have built large companies, and more resources to help nurture talent in business and technology.

That expertise could end up coming from Holly herself. She now manages 20 employees and PixC processes a million photos per month. Her next goal is to see the whole process automated, so creators can focus on their creative side — and she isn’t even 30 yet.

It’s moving overseas that has helped her spread her wings, but she says she could definitely imagine coming back to build her business empire and share her enthusiasm and unstoppable drive.

“In Silicon Valley, people won’t close down your idea,” she says. “They want to know how you’re going to grow.”

Holly Cardew will be a panellist at Vogue Codes Live on 29 July at Carriageworks, Sydney. Tickets available here for $125 (half day) or $200 (full day).