From bikinis on a kitchen bench to global resort wear brand, Bydee boomed 700pc

Hard launching in the UK with a localised site was pivotal for scaling Australian resort wear brand Bydee’s global operations to meet demand.

To optimise the customer experience and business model Bydee’s UK site went live last week, with a few tweaks tailored to the northern hemisphere.

E-commerce businesses are navigating new economic conditions that have seen reduced discretionary spending and the Covid-19 online shopping storms subsiding.

Brands that take a strategic customer-centric approach can benefit from what funds customers do have and with ‘Euro summer’ heating up – Bydee is investing in meeting market demand with a localised approach.

Bydee’s business boomed to new heights during the Covid-19 pandemic and resulted in a 700 per cent growth, from 2020-2021. 

This was achieved by tapping into the travel-inspired swimwear niche and pivoting the expansion to markets that resonated.

Now in its next global growth phase after successfully entering the US Dessy Hairis, Bydee founder and creative director told Inside Retail, “We are expanding into new markets and have our eyes locked on the UK at the moment.”

Scaling a small business

Founded in 2013, the first iteration of Bydee was a purely product-focused passion project, “I was making all the swim and bralettes myself.” 

In her last year of school, Hairis started selling her handmade side hustle to her friends. “I studied a Bachelor of fashion and textiles and from there I started doing market stalls and that’s the first iteration of the formal business side of things,” she said.

In 2016 Hairis quit her retail job to focus on Bydee, “I thought, okay, well, I can make a career out of this,” she said.

From that point, Hairis hustled across Sydney at three markets per week and retailed Bydee on a basic DIY website, Ebay and Facebook.

“At the time the world of e-commerce was very new and very unfamiliar and I didn’t even think that was necessarily an avenue we could go down,” Hairis said.

“I was thinking wholesale and was taking my product around to stores and I remember being rejected all the time. One person said to me, ‘Oh, we only take on brands’ – Bydee was brand,” she added.

After five years in business, Hairis invested in a website capable of scaling.

In July 2019 Bydee pivoted and became a pureplay online retailer and hired its first casual employee.

“I’d be at the markets forever and I didn’t believe that model was scalable,” Hairis said adding, “Since then I’ve never looked back and the business just continues to grow.”

Then “Covid hit and we had this travel-inspired collection and I knew I had to pivot,” Hairis said. Up to this point, Bydee had only been focused on retailing to a local market.

With a newfound niche in printed swimwear and surging e-commerce sales, Bydee pivoted to adopt a global focus after the restrictions of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic halted travel and demand for bikinis locally.

“We put $1000 into US ad spend and that went crazy,” Hairis said, adding “I didn’t understand the potential until we saw the return on investment.”

“Since then we’ve continued to grow 100 per cent YOY, with 50 per cent of the business revenue coming from the US currently,” Hairis said.

Solid foundations

In 2020 Hairis acknowledged Bydee was “going to be way beyond” her spare bedroom and focused on strategically scaling Bydee globally and investing in the infrastructure that would support this.

Localising the website was one strategy Hairis credits for optimising its international growth following the boom.

In August 2020, Bydee moved from a three-by-three-metre space into a 200sqm warehouse. “We were in that warehouse for three years and by the third, we were busting at the seams, we couldn’t get out fast enough,” Hairis said.

“During this time a print went viral – we couldn’t keep it in stock and then copycats came,” Hairis “That’s when it hit – the business had legs and was scalable,” Hairis said

“I remember feeling personally victimised when these copies came out, now I’ve realised that’s just how fast-fashion works,” she said.

“We’re a collection-based business, we don’t have a core bread-and-butter basic range to get us through. We’re constantly evolving, launching new prints and not every print hits,” Hairis said.

“We’re only as good as our last collection,” she added.

From then on it was about how the next print would be created and how it would be marketed and delivered to customers.

Digital native

“Not to go too deep into it, but VAT and duties in the UK are a real hindrance to Australian businesses,” Hairis said.

“Whilst we’ve always shipped to the UK, it wasn’t optimised for the customer.”

“If I put myself in that customer’s shoes, I wouldn’t want to order from an international website – be charged to receive my order and then charged again if I needed to return it,” Hairis said.

“All that and I can’t even get my tax back, it’s a really poor experience,” Hairis added. “We’ve tried our best to deliver the best possible customer experience as an Australian brand.” 

By offering the Bydee customer “the best VAT pricing structure” and efficient and reliable shipping into the UK – offering the customer two shipping options DHL Express and standard.

“That’s going to be pivotal, the feedback was our customers don’t want to be paying tax on every piece they buy,” Hairis said and flagged “Australian fast-fashion brands aren’t experiencing this – they have a much lower average order value (AOV), being a high-quality, more luxury swimwear brand we are having that issue,” she said.

“It’s so important for me as the business owner that whatever we do, we have our customers front of mind,” Hairis said.

Now the business will put advertising spend behind marketing to the UK.

In-store next

Bydee has a retail store attached to its head office in Sydney’s Roseberry postcode – notorious for Australian rag-trade flagships. 

“We opened this door to gain feedback from our customer, it’s been great to have that connection,” Hairis said.

When the business became pureplay e-commerce “it was hard not having face-to-face communication with our customer,” she added.

Scaling the business and simultaneously maintaining control of the customers’ experience is a pivotal part of Bydee’s growth strategy.

“With wholesale, you can lose control in terms of merchandising,” Hairis said, “We are looking into opening a few flagship stores, but we’re not looking to have 35 stores Australia-wide.”

Bydee’s philosophy is to create products that customers fall in love with and repeat purchase.

“We’ve got a 45 per cent customer return rate in Australia, which is extremely high and a 25 per cent return rate in the US. Noting that in the US we’re currently going hard targeting our ad spend at acquiring new customers,” Hairis said.

“On our new collection launch days, our repeat customer rate soars to about 70 per cent,” Hairis said, adding “our core Bydee babes are definitely coming back.”

“Our average order value is one bikini and we’re happy with that – we want our customers to buy that one bikini, fall in love, become obsessed and then the rest is history,” Hairis said.

Data will drive the next markets Bydee will look to gain a greater market share in after growing the UK, “there are areas in Europe and Canada where we have high customer traction, but again these places have high shipping taxes – we’ll look at what we can do to optimise those, starting with the UK,” Hairis said.

Brand product diversification is on the horizon that will stem from Hairis’s love of vintage finds and statement pieces to wear with resort wear.

Focused on not diluting the brand Bydee plans to continue crafting authentic, unique products that inspire travel and adventure as a one-stop shop for Europe-inspired capsule wardrobes – with a focus on beach-to-bar outfits.

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