‘You've got to learn': Young Aussie reveals how a simple idea turned into a multi-million dollar business

News.com.au

5 hours ago

Raquel Bouris has built up a multimillion-dollar perfume empire, but even she still makes mistakes that can cost her six figures.
Ms Bouris, 31, is the founder of Who Is Elijah, a genderless fragrance brand that describes itself as 'bold, timeless and unapologetic' and has been widely successful since its launch in 2018.
Well, almost since launch. When Ms Bouris originally launched the brand on Shopify, she made 'zero sales,' which ended up being both the making of her and the business.
'It was one of those garage to global stories,' she told news.com.au.
Who Is Elijah came to be after Ms Bouris attended the Coachella music festival back in 2017 and met a woman who she said smelled amazing.
It was so good that even after she returned to Australia, she couldn't stop thinking about the other woman's perfume.
It prompted her to track down the smell, which the fellow Coachella-goer said was from India, and once she started wearing it back in Sydney, she began getting constant compliments.
'I had over 100 people asking me what the fragrance was,' she said.
The compliments she received on the fragrance made her realise how much Aussies craved a good scent.
The 31-year-old found an Aussie perfume partner to work with and then launched her fragrance on Shopify – to zero sales.
If anything, the failure motivated her because she knew the product was good, so she started hitting the pavement.
'I just started walking into stores and introducing myself and nine out of ten times they'd start stocking the fragrances and I very quickly built up stockists,' she said.
Two years later, she quit her full-time job, and at that point the Who is Elijah brand was being stocked in over 50 stores.
'I was making $20,000 a month in revenue,' she said.
Ms Bouris said when quit her job she is 'embarrassed to say' she didn't fully understand the business yet.
She didn't even know the difference between profit and revenue, but she did see that her perfume business was bringing in money.
'No one was teaching me what profit and loss was. I quit right after I got into David Jones, and then around that time, I got a bookkeeper and accountant,' she said.
From there, the business just boomed, from making $1 million a year to $10 million a year, and last year, it made $20 million in revenue.
It's the kind of crazy success people only dream about but Ms Bouris said it comes with making so many mistakes.
For instance, this year, they've focused on scaling back rather than growth. They went from being stocked with over 600 stores to only 100.
The business founder said she wants to focus on getting the 'structure right' and that being stocked in fewer stores hasn't impacted revenue.
Perhaps what separates Ms Bouris from her peers is that she's prepared to acknowledge a mistake and rectify it rather than keep going down the same path to avoid admitting she was wrong.
She's also recently regretted 'paying ridiculous, like six-figure amounts of money' to people to do something that she should have just done herself.
She wants to be open about that though, because in her opinion growing a business doesn't involve getting everything right.
'When I first started and I'd listen to other founders and I'd look up to them so much and I thought they were amazing, and then I got to know these people, and they'd come to me for advice,' she said.
'I'm very honest with our journey, and it has stuck with me that people in business don't like to admit that it is hard and they've made mistakes.'
Ms Bouris said she feels like the last six years of business have ultimately been about learning 'lesson after lesson' but that is part of it.
'I started this when I was 23, I knew nothing about owning my own company. You've got to learn and there's a lot to learn.'