Asian Australians’ personalised leather accessories startup a huge hit, going from blog to business and making fashion models fans
The Daily Edited went from sideline to full-time occupation for two fashion-mad lawyers, racking up annual sales of US$24 million within four years and expanding to three continents. Customisation and limited runs are keys to its success
By early 2015,an e-commerce start-up called The Daily Edited, launched a year earlier as a sideline by two Australian lawyers to sell personalised leather lifestyle accessories, was approaching half a million Australian dollars a month in sales.
Their accountant suggested to the pair, Alyce Tran and Tania Liu, that they might want to consider quitting their day jobs. A few months later – after having squirrelled away A$200,000 (US$155,000) in savings as seed capital – they did just that.
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“It wasn’t like we quit for nothing – we were both very senior lawyers at two very good law firms [Allens in Perth and King & Wood Mallesons in Sydney],” says Tran, The Daily Edited’s creative and strategic director, who is based in Sydney (Liu has since moved to Hong Kong to oversee production in Guangzhou, where she was born).
Three years later, with a staff of 130 and an omnichannel retail presence – it has physical stores in three countries – The Daily Edited, or TDE, is on track to hit A$30 million in sales this year, up 36 per cent from 2017.
“At the time we never had the intention to create what we have. It kind of kept on snowballing and then, well, ‘Oh my God, this is a thing’,” says Tran.
