How a school dropout started a multi-million dollar empire from her garage
And if you've dipped your toe into the world of online shopping, there is a high chance you've bought something from Brittney Saunders' company, Fayt.
Watch 7NEWS at 6pm for a behind the scenes look at the Fayt warehouse.
Saunders started out as a content creator after discovering some American influencers on Youtube when she was 14-years-old and knew she wanted to do it.
She grew a loyal group of followers after making Youtube videos and then eventually branched out to Instagram and Tiktok too.
Those loyal followers turned into a customer base when she launched Fayt almost eight years ago. Brittney Saunders at Fayt. Credit: 7NEWS
'I guess, yeah, I became an influencer. I think I always knew deep down that wasn't gonna be sustainable for me forever,' she told 7NEWS.
Fayt sells womenswear, but with a twist.
The clothing shuns the standard model and instead runs its collections in a full suite of sizes. Saunders' story is a modern day fairytale and now she's sharing all the secrets to her success in her brand new memoir. Credit: 7NEWS
'As we got bigger and bigger, I'd add another size and another.,' Saunders said.
'And then it got to the point where we had sizes six to 26 in everything. And now it's just it's normal to us and I forget that not every brand does that.'
Fayt is now so big, it has outgrown its 1300sqm warehouse and is expanding to a second storage space next door.
Saunders' story is a modern day fairytale and now she's sharing all the secrets to her success in her brand new memoir.
Watch 7NEWS at 6pm for a behind the scenes look at the Fayt warehouse and to hear more details about Saunders' book: Just Getting Started.
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9 News
2 hours ago
- 9 News
Deodorant, butter knives hit as Trump expands steel tariff
Your web browser is no longer supported. To improve your experience update it here Hundreds of different goods just got a lot more expensive to import into the US, now that President Donald Trump's 50 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium has kicked in. Butter knives, baby strollers, spray deodorants and fire extinguishers, considered "derivative" steel and aluminium products, were previously excluded from the 50 per cent tariff, though they were still subject to the higher country-specific tariffs Trump enacted over the last several months. However, on Friday, US Customs and Border Protection and a division of the US Commerce Department published notices informing US importers that 407 categories of goods containing steel and aluminium would immediately be subject to the 50 per cent tariffs at 12.01am ET on Monday (2.01pm Tuesday AEST). Spray deodorant is among an extensive list of goods now subject to 50 per cent steel and aluminium tariffs in the US. (diego_cervo/iStockphoto/Getty Images via CNN) The non-steel and non-aluminium components of the products face other applicable levies. The abrupt move leaves many US-based importers between a rock and a hard place, with goods they already paid for currently in transit. If they decide to accept the goods, the importers will have to pay considerably higher tariffs. But if they, for instance, tell cargo operators not to unload their orders at US ports to avoid paying tariffs, they'll likely lose money. "Today's action expands the reach of the steel and aluminium tariffs and shuts down avenues for circumvention – supporting the continued revitalisation of the American steel and aluminum industries," Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler said in a statement. As is the case with any tariff in place, businesses may not pass on the entire tariff expense they've paid to consumers by raising prices. But the chances of businesses absorbing a tariff as high as 50 per cent will likely be slimmer compared to goods tariffed at lower rates. In addition to the 50 per cent tariff on copper-based goods that recently took effect, the levies "will likely ripple through the manufacturing supply chain, raising production costs across construction, automotive, and electronics sectors," analysts at the Telsey Group said in a note on Tuesday. tariffs Donald Trump Economics USA World CONTACT US
News.com.au
3 hours ago
- News.com.au
Cameroon's star is on the rise. These are the minerals fuelling it
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The now delisted company had sought to develop the giant Mbalam-Nabeba project that straddled the border between Cameroon and the Republic of Congo but first had the former fail to implement the exploitation permit in late 2020 and the latter revoke its mining permit and award it to a little known company with Chinese backing. While the Republic of Congo has since settled with Sundance, Cameroon allegedly declined to turn out for an arbitration hearing in late January 2025 and that matter is still in limbo. Despite this, investors are starting to sense the winds of change. Canaccord Genuity mining analyst Tim Hoff – who has had an excellent run of predicting winners with his Diggers and Dealers stock selections – says Cameroon has not been seriously explored for some time. This is despite the country having interesting geological features that weren't obvious in retrospect, which resulted in exploration never quite hitting the point where the market sat up and took notice. This is also why there are world-class assets sitting outside of the mainstream just waiting to be picked up. 'I think that's probably the largest driver of why Cameroon is shaping up as an emerging country to look for these things,' Hoff, one of a handful of local analysts to have traversed the West African country, said. "We've also seen shifts in regulatory policy and a convergence of significant discoveries, financial backing and policy changes to present an opportunity. "I think the (Cameroon) Government is keenly aware that forestry, which is one of their major export markets, is not sustainable in its current form and it's going to look to ban the export of uncut wood over the next few years. "The Government has taken a positive step to look at their resources and say how can we attract investment and how can we shift our economic outlook, and resources has certainly come to the front there." 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Canyon Resources' (ASX:CAY) Minim Martap bauxite project is unarguably the poster child for the path towards minerals development in Cameroon with progress underway on key infrastructure workstreams and an updated definitive feasibility study due in August 2025. This is aimed at bringing Minim Martap, which has a resource of 1027Mt grading 45.3% Al2O3, into production in early 2026 with the first bauxite shipment in H1 2026. Highlighting the confidence that Cameroon has in the project, AFG Bank Cameroon provided the company with a medium-term syndicated credit facility of US$140m to fund infrastructure for the project. 'I think the country will use Minim Martap as a flagship project to say, we permitted a mine, we've been supporting this company with debt, we have been supporting the company with its plans around expanding our rail and so on,' Hoff said. Rutile interest growing While Minim Martap is drawing attention to Cameroon as a mining destination, bauxite is by no means the only mineral of interest. Interest in natural rutile – a high-value titanium mineral – has been growing steadily thanks in no small part to Sovereign Metals' (ASX:SVM) progress with the Tier 1 Kasiya project, which has a resource of 1.8 billion tonnes grading 1% rutile, in Malawi. Mining giant Rio Tinto already has a large stake in Sovereign and its Kasiya project and is reported to be interested in increasing its exposure to titanium supply. While there is no confirmation that Rio might be interested, rutile is starting to come into its own as a mineral resource of interest in Cameroon. This was sparked by Lion Rock Minerals (ASX:LRM) – then known as Peak Minerals, which discovered the titanium feedstock at its ~8800km2 Minta project early in 2025. Its exploration has identified high-priority zones across a 3500km2 area that's prospective for mineral sands rich in rutile, zircon and monazite rare earths. Rutile grades of up to 69.8% have been noted at Minta while Minta East has seen zircon grades of up to 21%. More importantly, drilling has confirmed the continuity and scale of the rutile-rich mineralisation at the project with every one of the 330 holes drilled to date that had reported assays having intersected heavy minerals. This has extended the defined mineralised footprint to a rather mind boggling 2125km2. Rutile-dominant deposits are incredibly rare and Hoff says it is exactly this kind of mineralisation that Lion Rock's exploration has been turning up. 'When you've got a high rutile content, it essentially equals a high value deposit,' he added. 'And this is starting to stand out in a big way from its peers, from what we're seeing to date. 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The Age
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His musings might be seen as an extended job application. Loading The dollar has long been persistently overvalued from a trade perspective, he argued, and that's in large part because dollar assets 'function as the world's reserve currency'. Can you have one without the other, both reserve currency supremacy and a much weaker dollar? Not according to Miran, who suggests that foreigners could be taxed on their holdings of US Treasuries to lessen their attractions to overseas investors, never mind that this would be both a technical and legal default. If that happened, then the dollar would indeed lose the commanding position it now holds; it's hard to imagine a policy less likely to make America great again, and essentially amounts to quack economics. As it happens, Trump already seems to be getting his way on a weaker dollar, and that's without even trying. Conventional economics would suggest that if you raise tariffs significantly, the dollar would appreciate to compensate, negating at least part of the impact of tariffs on prices. In the event, it's actually gone the other way, depreciating by nearly 10 per cent on a trade-weighted basis since it first became apparent that Trump was deadly serious about tariffs. Growing policy uncertainty, including precisely where the president stands on the strong dollar policy, is a large part of the explanation. There has been a significant rotation out of dollar assets among international investors, which no doubt has further to run if inflationary monetary policy is pursued. White House attacks on the integrity of the Fed – and the data, whenever they show the economy in a poor light – have further fuelled the loss of confidence. A withholding tax on US Treasuries might well turn this into a rout. US policymakers are nonetheless confident that they can preserve and even enhance the dollar's core position in the world's financial system while at the same time inducing a more competitive exchange rate. As on most other aspects of Trump's economic agenda, the president's 'vision' for the dollar is a mass of contradictions and apparently incompatible goals. Their big hope rests on stablecoins, privately issued digital tokens which are already beginning to make inroads into global payments. These use distributed ledger and blockchain technologies to make payments faster and cheaper than current systems. Backed dollar-for-dollar by US Treasuries, central bank reserves and other supposedly risk-free assets, stablecoins are promoted by the Trump administration as a market-led way of defending and further promoting the internationalisation of the dollar. They also potentially provide a major alternative source of demand for US Treasuries. I've written before about the long-term threat that poorly regulated stablecoins might pose to financial stability. It's not just about ensuring that the assets that secure the stablecoins' value are reliable. It's also about making such tokens immune to cyber attack, theft and digital terrorism. Advances in supercomputing make the public keys and digital certificates on which ownership rights rest look much more vulnerable than they used to be. Privately promoted stablecoins could easily become subject to self-reinforcing runs if their integrity is in any way challenged or ownership rights are called into question. Some readers may be familiar with Robert Harris's novel The Second Sleep, in which the author imagines a world far into the future where humanity has returned to almost medieval levels of advancement. The calamity that has befallen society is never explicitly spelt out, but the most likely explanation is eventually traced to a complete collapse of the digital economy. Something I didn't know until I read the book is that London is just three meals away from anarchy. Such a collapse could, of course, occur without the addition of stablecoins; the vast majority of commerce these days is just zeros and ones on a computer. But at least with fiat money, you know that the full force of the sovereign state and its central bank stand behind it. There may be no such guarantor with stablecoins. Any strategy for sustaining the power and reach of the mighty dollar that depends solely on the advance of stablecoins would seem peculiarly high risk. Loading There's no telling how Miran might behave if granted the privilege of running the US Federal Reserve. Most go native, and quickly forget any iconoclastic leanings they might have had, once the responsibilities of high office start to weigh. Witness Powell, who – though it now seems incredible – was Trump's pick for the position. In any case, Trump jeopardises the strong dollar policy at his peril. Down the decades, it's generally served the US well, and is a vital part of America's wider geopolitical power. If it ain't broke, why break it?
