Kigu.me, Australia’s largest importer of animal onesies and authentic kigurumis, struck gold a few years back when onesie-wearing celebrities made the comfortable piece of clothing the new ‘it’ item. It didn’t take long before the onesie virus spread across the globe, and soon enough, Kigu.me needed a tool to help them keep up with the growing demand.
Aidan Lister, serial entrepreneur and Co-founder at Kigu.me, told us about how they needed an instant way to keep track of their sales and how Geckoboard helped them during their crucial growth stage.
Two friends and a onesie
Aidan Lister and Daniel Labib met while studying Engineering at Monash University. In February 2009, the two friends were on a three month working holiday in Niseko, Japan, when they first laid eyes on kigurumis. They were on sale, hanging on a rack next to the Hello Kitty backpacks at a Seikomark (Japan's version of K-mart). They took an instant liking to the piece of clothing, and the entire group decided to buy them. They spent the whole winter season sporting them on the slopes, and when they returned home and started wearing them at university parties people were desperate to get them. Problem was, no one was selling them in Australia.
The idea of bringing this fun and comfortable piece of clothing to Australia percolated until a second ski trip two years later. That year, the costumes had the same impact, and it didn’t take long before Kigu.me entered the Australian market with a bang.
Keeping up with ‘dodecadoopaling’ sales
Three years ago, the onesie trend went wild. It was catching on even more when celebrities like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus jumped on the bandwagon. Even the British Prime Minister talked about his onesie on air, which resulted in a huge blast of onesie fever. We got a few big stories in the national papers and then we landed an interview on the national news. Then it just took off.
It was this extreme hockey curve. A parabolic growth. Our sales were just doubling, tripling or I don't know what the word for 10 timing is, dodecadoopaling every month? So it was quite a ride. Six or seven months into the growth and we would sit there just refreshing the orders page. It was like, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s when we signed up for a trial and made a few custom widgets on Geckoboard in order to bring up the daily, weekly and monthly sales.
We wanted a really simple solution to being able to see the health of the business on a daily basis. Once you see those numbers, you start to subconsciously understand more about your data. So for example, and we didn't have any idea about this previously, we found out that Mondays and Tuesdays were our biggest days for sales. Knowing this, we started targeting our social media following on those days and sales increased even more.
That's the power of Geckoboard. By having the data visualised - even if you don't necessarily draw correlations from it immediately - the brain processes the information in the background.
Download the case study to get the full story and find out what Aidan has to say about identifying the right metrics and using data to spot opportunities.
