We've all been there, Friday night, busy week at work, stressed tired and needing to relax with our favourite friends - Sauv Blanc and Pizza. That Friday night I realised I really didn't enjoy what I was doing and there must be more to life than this?
One of my previous bosses once said "You'll never work a day in your life if you enjoy what you do", this started me thinking..... The only thing I enjoyed doing was drinking wine, sharing inappropriate memes with my friends and shopping for random funny gifts on the internet for friends and family .... AND that's how it all started! I have a lot of friends and family with an inappropriate sense of humour and couldn't find anywhere that would sell gifts I found funny so I decided to create them.
The early days were a basic website a few designed products, lots of inappropriate memes and a trickle of sales - which meant the moon to me! I continued my HR job during the day - spending my time telling people how to behave appropriately and then in the evenings I would be creating my products and working out how I could sell them. My HR work gave me a huge source of material for many of the products.
In September 2017 one of my mugs went "viral" it hit over 13 million views and the orders started pouring in. I realised then that my dream of creating a curated store for people with an inappropriate sense of humour could become a reality!
It hasn't been an easy ride, lots of late nights, disapproval from many avenues, 16 hour days and credit cards maxed but as you all know you work long and hard at something you love doing you cannot fail to be successful! (she says hopefully - credit cards still maxed!)
Don't settle, life is short, have fun!
Lori X
The whole process was soo exciting, here is a photo of me getting my make up done at home for the audition! (I don't spend much time out of my active wear so getting "done up" is an occasion for me!)
If you saw the episode you will see that I didn't get ripped to shreds, I received offers from all five Sharks. Choosing Naomi was a no brainer for me, she has always been an inspiration and she shares the same vision as us - ensuring people do not receive boring gifts!
In addition she has travelled exactly the same road we are embarking on and those lessons learned will be invaluable to us.
Here is a photo of Ben and I after the filming - we had 50 mins before we had to pick up the kids so we had a glass of champagne (well sparkling wine) and a pizza at our local pub.
Can you see the glint of pure happiness and excitement in our eyes?
We watched the episode live with our friends. My family are in the UK so I facetimed live with them as well. Needless to say much fun and champagne was had. Budget Ben had our website analytics live on another screen -within 1 minute of my pitch our visits were rising astronomically, hitting 6k concurrent users during the pitch (our usual numbers were 15-30 live at anyone time).
It’s been 7 years since I pressed live on that first website. Since then we have grown year on year.
Budget Ben joined the business in July 2018 as G.O.D (Global Operations Director) I am C.E.O. - Chief Expletive Officer and we have the wonderful Monique working with us as Head of Customer Experience she takes the stress out of your online shopping and puts the fun back in. Michelle works with us and in her words “fucks about on socials” in other companies that would be called Content Director.
We are proud to be a small Australian family run business. We try and ensure all our gifts are sourced here in Australia and we work with a network of other Australian small gift manufacturers. When you buy from us you are not lining the pockets of some overseas corporate – you are helping us send our kids to sports, feed our pets and buy the alcohol we need to come up with these gift ideas!
We have sent our gifts all over the world (except United Arab Emirates and Korea as they do not share our inappropriate sense of humour).
We are so excited for the future. we look forward to keeping you updated on our inappropriate journey and our big hairy audacious goal of being "THE GLOBAL HOME OF INAPPROPRIATE GIFTS"
Cheers Lori, Ben, Monique and Michelle.
Don't forget.....#lifeisshort #havefun
Sing, scream, laugh,make a scene break the rules, cross the line You only get one life
LIVE IT