It's Not Just Fashion!

Liam Scanlan

Sydney School of Entrepreneurship (SSE) Alumni

What is your organisation?

Eat Your Water, we are one of Australia's largest and fastest-growing independent surf brands. 

We began in 2015, basically out of my house. Back then, it was just a way for me to make money, a side income. But then it grew, and as the business grew, the direction that I wanted to take, started to pivot! 

Nowadays, we are really trying to push into the sustainability and ethics side of things, which is obviously costly. I guess being able to do it as we grow has helped because more money means we can invest more in it.

Still to this day, we try to keep away from using the actual term sustainability and ethics in our business. So we don't tell customers we're a sustainable company, just because we have a few practices that are sustainable at the moment. So yeah, I guess it's a bit of pet peeve of mine when small businesses say they're sustainable and ethical when in reality they aren’t. We still do supply chain audits and things like that, but we still don't go to the depth that I'd like to go. 

What I like to say, is if you don't have the money to do something like Patagonia is doing, where their supply chain audits are crazy, and they've got full teams looking at it, you shouldn't be claiming all the time that you're sustainable and ethical!

We’ve got a really good community from all over the world. I think, last month we had 130,000 people go through the website and up to about 74,000 followers on Instagram alone, all over social media. We still sell it exclusively online, so the only place you can get us is on our website. Despite having offers from little independent retailers and some of the bigger guns in Australia, we are just sticking to what we like to do. I'm all about e-commerce personally and I think that's the way forward. So that's where we stay.

What inspired you to start Eat Your Water?

So, when I finished high school, I got an ATAR (Australian 16-20yrs Grading system) of 64, which is like your final grade, essentially out of, I think 99.99 other than a hundred. This only left me with a couple of options to go to uni. I ended up choosing marine biology. I had to travel about an hour to university and then an hour back home. On my very first day there, I was driving back on the freeway, where I pulled over, called my mum and I said, “This isn't for me. Which was a bit of a shock to the system because, you know, you spend year 11 and 12 at high school thinking, ‘I'm going to do this after high school’.

Mum, of course, said to stick it out, probably worried that I'd drop out and do, god knows what? So I did, but three weeks into that degree, I was sitting at university and I just opened up an Instagram page.

I think the reason that I did that was that idea that I didn't want to essentially stand in a swamp and look at shrimp or anything but the main inspiration. 

I asked myself what I wanted to do and I honestly, I didn't want to work. I just wanted to live a life where I could do whatever I wanted. So I thought starting a business would mean I didn't have to work, but that was wrong. My dad worked from home at the time. So I guess for me, I saw that he was working from home and he got to travel a fair bit with work.

That was the main inspiration behind starting it. I guess as I've developed as a business leader and being exposed to, especially in the fashion industry, all the things that are wrong with not only businesses but also businesses in the fashion industry that sort of inspired me in different ways to start to implement change and see what we can do. It is an uphill battle for sure. There are so many things wrong with the fashion industry. It's coming to air a lot more these days more recognition and awareness, so trying to combat that as a company and be the best that we can be. Talking to other people always inspires me, getting their views.

What have been some of your challenges?

Being in business there are challenges literally every week and in my opinion if there wasn’t, business would be boring. If it is all smooth sailing, you sort of just get bored.

Big challenges are always within your supply chain. Especially being online and only being able to purchase through our website. Stock management is huge, something that we're always trying to work on, but it's a never-ending battle against trying to tighten that supply chain, so we always have stock in. 

In terms of the sustainability and ethics side, like a major challenge that we're experiencing at the moment. We manufacture in a number of countries, but primarily China and Indonesia in Indonesia, our manufacturer is quite good. We work with a company in Newcastle called core ethics who have good ties with a lot of companies and government in Indonesia. In China, even though we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with this manufacturer,  we're still a tiny fish in a big pond. So trying to influence them to do things that are essentially conceived as ‘right’, is a lot more difficult than in Indonesia where you are almost treated as a guest, in a way. Well, you're the main source of income for most their community or their area, when you're spending that amount of money, but in China, you don’t have much of a say.

That's a major challenge at the moment. We're thinking whether we stick with China or we just run our guns in Indonesia, but it is difficult to navigate that scene when they're so stuck in their old ways of just mass-producing for the bigger companies who mostly get their stuff made in China. Plenty of challenges. 

Honestly, I had no experience in business and I didn't even tell my parents that I'd started the business. So I was really independent and solo at the start. I still try to keep it that way.

What have been your best resources?

Honestly, I don't use too many resources.

I use that analogy of the glass half full. So the way I see it is I'll make a decision and if it's wrong, then that's, it's sort of good in a way, because rather than say someone telling me if I do something, something bad is going to happen, I just get a mouth full of water of the mistake. 

So it's still to this day, I try to be pretty independent, but I guess like resources, it mostly is other business owners and people within the community more than anything.

I just finished a bachelor of business, bachelor of innovation, entrepreneurship. In terms of what you were learning, it was just all books and it wasn't all that helpful in my opinion, those connections that you got through university and SSE, for instance, that in my opinion, was more beneficial than anything.

Getting to bounce ideas off other people. I've definitely been more independent as a business, especially being young at the same time. Yeah, I sort of just figure it best way to do it like that. And then you're getting the full experience rather than just like a paragraph from a textbook saying, don't do this. These are the five principles, but business is never like that, maybe in a huge corporation where you have to be following models and things like that.

What advice do you have for your peers?

Honestly, just go for it because it's the learning you get from just doing it! Don't, don't expect to make heaps from it. So don't go into it thinking you're going to come away a millionaire a year later, no matter how good your idea is. Probably the biggest mistake that I see from young people starting a business is they'll compare themselves to people who are in their industry and doing well. Then if they're not getting those results straight away, they'll simply quit, which is so common because you know, they'll spend a thousand dollars, whatever they want to spend on getting their business started. Then they might not see a return on that money immediately.

So I understand that can be disheartening, I think in those first three months that I started my business, I was down $1,500 and I just kept sticking with it cause I thought, well, I've gotta make that money back somehow! So just sticking with it throughout all those, road bumps is the main thing.

I know it's definitely easy to quit. Yeah. At the same time, follow your gut because if you know, something's not working, you've always got to look to pivot around it.

Don't just keep butting your head into a wall.  

If it was that easy, everyone would do it. So you have to push through to actually make something successful.

How did you find out about SSE?

I was part of the first-ever cohort of SSE. I think back in 2017, I was in my second year of doing business. I was doing a class and the lecturer just mentioned it and started nominating a few of the students who were doing well in the class. I applied, and that's pretty much how I found out about it. SSE took a lot of that junk that I was just learning in class, out of a book and put it into real life for me. Before then I had no experience of an entrepreneurial ecosystem or anything like that.

So for me getting to hear people from that ecosystem who has been there and done it, talk and open my eyes up to how it all works. Being from Newcastle NSW, our ecosystem is very tight and small (which isn't a bad thing), but going to Sydney and seeing the way they operate, was an eye-opener.

They put things into a real-life perspective, which motivated me as well. I made some really good connections. Especially with two of the people there, I'm still extremely close with those guys and talk to them pretty much every week. Being a business owner, during those times when I didn't have really any employees it's so good to have other people who understand the way businesses work.

Why would you recommend SSE to someone?

SSE gives you that practical experience and It also takes you out of your comfort zone. It puts you in with people who are like-minded. At university, (I'm assuming it's pretty similar for most universities) a lot of students are there just because either their parents said so, or they just want to get a piece of paper at the end.

You get put in with students who are motivated and actually want to start a business. Even though maybe not everyone there has started a business or even has the intention to start a business, they're all pretty driven and motivated. So that was probably the best part for, in my opinion,  having those other like-minded students, you can bounce off each other pretty well. 

To find out more about SSE - https://sse.edu.au/

Eat Your Water - https://www.eatyourwater.com.au/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/eatyourwater/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/eatyourwater/?hl=en