Shelley Dempsey

They say that being different is often what leads to great creativity or great business thinking. In Sue Gillett's case, being different is what has led to the creation of a robust manufacturing business which now earns up to about $180,000 in turnover every year - most of it now on the Internet.

You see, by Australian standards, Sue is a very tall woman - 6ft 3 inches. Husband Peter is tall too - at 6ft 5 inches - but unlike Sue, he has no difficulty in buying clothes when he goes shopping.

It was Sue's plain and simple frustration at being unable to find clothes for her tall frame which led to the creation of The Long Tall Clothing Company in Melbourne in 1995. Husband Peter quit his job as a computer network LAN programmer for Telstra a couple of years later and set up their website - and now the net sales are so strong that they have just shut up their shopfront in Melbourne.

"We didn't need the shop," says Peter Gillett. "We've immediately saved $70,000 in costs by closing it down. We'll probably lose a few customers, but it's not worth the expense of maintaining a shop just to satisfy a couple of people who might only buy one or two things a year.

"We said it's not worth paying the costs of the shop per year with three other staff and rent and other things. So now we're relying on internet orders, phone orders and mail order."

In the first quarter of this year, 38 per cent of sales were coming from the shop and the rest from other sales, including the net. Specifically, the breakdown looks something like this at the moment. Nineteen per cent Australian Internet orders, 28 per cent export Internet orders and 12 per cent phone orders. The rest are mail order.

"We decided in the first quarter of this year to look at the figures and if the shop wasn't actually making a profit, we were going to close it," Gillett says.

"We're finding that more and more people are buying stuff on the net and by mail order and that the number of actual women coming into the shop has been going down over the last 12 months steadily." So on October 13 this year, the doors were closed for the last time and now the business is taking a whole new direction.

In the past year, about 700 customers have bought items from The Long Tall Clothing Company - 300 overseas and 400 in Australia. About 2,000 customers altogether have purchased items of clothing. The customer base ranges from 60 year-old women to 15-year-olds.

About 150 orders are placed a month, earning revenue of about $15,000 per month. The average order size is worth about $100. Nearly all overseas orders are generated by the internet.

Overall, earnings were about $45,000 in the September quarter this year, up from $43,000 for the same period last year.

The number of Australian sales has been increasing as an overall proportion of total business - from 8 per cent last year to about 12 per cent now. In the third quarter of last year, there were 3,400 Australian orders and in same September quarter of this year, 5,500.

"It's getting to be more and more, especially since we've closed the shop now and our younger customers are quite happy to do stuff on the net," says Gillett. "We don't know about the older ones at this stage."

Cornering the Market in Australia
Asked why he thinks the business has generated so much interest, Gillett says: "It's a very small niche market and there's no-one else in Australia doing anything like it on the net. There are only a few companies overseas doing it as well."

Competitors include the Long Tall Sally chain in the United Kingdom, which has a strong chain of shopfronts, and Tallwomen.com in the United States.

Despite this, Gillett says he makes sure that his Australian business ranks first or near first on all search engines on the net. Using a US software program called Web Position, which costs about $US100 each year to update, Gillett automatically lists at the click of a button the business on every search engine available on the program. It also tracks the position of the site on search engines against competitors and comparitive rises and falls in rankings. Gillett resubmits the site and keywords to search engines every couple of weeks and estimates that to do the same job manually would take at least 10 hours per week.

Listing on search engines is now the only form of advertising or promotion for the business, following closure of the shop.

Gillett built the Long Tall Clothing website himself in 1997 for a cash outlay of about $2,000. He has built his own customer database as well, based on Microsoft Access, which tracks every sale and who bought what, when they bought it, whether they have refunded items and all types of sales.

About 27 different brands of clothing for women are stocked on the site, but about half of all stock is now being manufactured by an in-house contractor for Long Tall Clothing.

Customers can either access the catalogue of clothes available on the website or order a hard copy version, which is printed twice a year.

The catalogue is produced totally in-house, except for printing. The business employs its own models and Gillett takes all the pictures for the site and for the printed catalogue.

About 1800 email addresses are used for customers to receive news updates and offers every couple of months.

But just because the business sells clothes designed exclusively for tall women, don't be foolish enough to automatically assume that all customers are female in the everyday sense of the word.

"We're in the Good Transvestites Guide as a cross-dresser-friendly shop," says Gillett. "We get quite a few cross-dressers. Some came into the shop in full costume as it were. Big booffy wigs and high heels."

Now there's a promising niche market ...

Reprinted from australia.internet.com.