Growing up, Jane Lu dreamt of waking up every morning and putting on a power suit to go to work at a fancy corporate finance job in one of the tall city buildings.
Today, the 38-year-old is the founder and CEO of online fashion retail company Showpo, which brings in over $100 million a year in revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Along with running a nine-figure business, Lu is also currently a judge on “Shark Tank Australia” and has built a following of almost 400,000 users across her social media platforms, but her path to success was far from easy.
Humble beginnings
Lu grew up as the only child in an immigrant household. She moved to Australia from China at age eight with her parents.
When her family first landed in Australia, Lu didn’t know how to speak English, and her parents had to work odd jobs for several years as they tried to establish their lives in the new country.
“You don’t realize you’re poor until... some kid makes you realize you’re poor,” she told CNBC Make It. “My mom... actually a cleaner for some of the [families of the] kids at my school.”
“I was the only foreigner at school that didn’t speak English,” she said, adding when she first started at school, she couldn’t go to the bathroom because she didn’t know how to ask where it was located.
Lu said the experience of feeling so different from her peers left her with a chip on her shoulder.
5 to 9 after the 9 to 5
Competitive and driven by nature, Lu has always been an overachiever.
During her first year of university, she had already landed a role at KPMG, one of the “Big 4” accounting firms. She worked there for about two and a half years, then moved onto a corporate finance role at Ernst & Young — all while balancing her school work.
In 2009, one of Lu’s friends approached her with a business idea: a pop-up store concept called “Fat Boye Group.” “With a silent ‘e,’” she said. This business idea eventually became Lu’s side hustle.
At that time, Lu was working in her corporate finance role during the day and on her business in the evenings.
On weekends, she would run the brick and mortar pop up store. “The way the pop up worked was, it was set up and packed down on a daily basis. So, it was like so much manual work,” she said.
She used her parent’s garage as a storage space for all of the business supplies, and would use any of her other free time handing out business cards with her partner, pitching their pop up concept to suppliers and running the store.
Quitting her corporate job in secret
As Lu realized that she loved running a business, she also began feeling very unhappy in her corporate role.
“I just hated it. I found it so boring, so dry,” she said. “I used to always look at my corporate job as financial security, and the thing that was going to lift me and my parents out of ever having to worry about not being able to pay rent or mortgage...Then, all of a sudden, looking at it as like a prison sentence.”
While the global financial crisis was in full swing, Lu’s day job became more demanding as her favorite managers were being made redundant.
Lu finally quit her corporate job in June 2010. The final straw: having to spend a half a day removing a circular reference in an excel sheet that causing the document to crash.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you have one life and now I’m three hours closer to death, and what have I done? I’ve done something so meaningless as to remove this circular reference,’” she said.
Lu decided to keep the decision a secret from her parents. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents I had quit my job to sell clothes in a pop up store,” she said.
So, for months, she would wake up early in the morning, put on a suit, have breakfast with her parents and commute into the city with her mom as if she was still working in her corporate finance role. After her mom went to work, Lu would sneak off to spend her entire day working on Fat Boye Group.
Hitting rock bottom
Coincidentally, about one month after Lu quit her job and went all in on the company, her business partner returned from an overseas vacation, and decided that she was over the startup life.
“She basically said: ’Look, Jane, I don’t want to do this anymore... I don’t want to be poor anymore. I don’t like the startup life. I’ve been job hunting while I was away and I’m going back to work,” said Lu.
At that point, Lu lacked the confidence to run the business by herself, so in July 2010, she shut down Fat Boye Group.
“If you cut to just a month ago, I had everything that me and my parents have been working towards: financial security, job security, and a great job at that,” she said. Then, she found herself in about $60,000 of debt due to money owed from her student loans, losing money in the business and more.
“I was a failure... I was embarrassed, ashamed, and I also couldn’t get another job because it was the middle of the global financial crisis. So I was just so devastated,” said Lu.
From $60,000 in debt to $100 million a year business
Two months later, Lu was still unemployed and looking for work, so she reached out to the only friend she knew that owned a business in hopes of securing a job at his company. But instead of offering Lu a job, he offered to connect her with someone he knew in the online fashion retail industry.
Lu met up with the girl, who she declined to name, and they hit it off immediately.
“Then maybe the third time meeting her, after a few too many glasses of red wine, we came up with a name and the concept for the store, and then that night, I came home and I was still drunk, and just built the website,” said Lu.
The new business partners decided on the name “Show Pony,” which was eventually shortened to “Showpo.” That same weekend in September 2010, they did their first photoshoot, found suppliers, and within one week, made their first sale.
Lu was still in debt at the time, so they couldn’t afford to pay for a traditional supplier or traditional marketing and had to get creative.
“We did traditional marketing for [the first business] and that just drained the business out of money, and that’s why Showpo, having no money, had to do social media,” said Lu, which she credits for contributing to the success of the company.
In addition, “the fact that [Fat Boye Group] was bricks and mortar, I saw that it wasn’t scalable, and that’s why Showpo was online first,” she said. “That’s the best crash course in business — when you actually fail at something, because I think that’s when you really learn.”
After about fifteen months, Lu’s business partner decided to leave as sales began declining.
“By the time that she was leaving, the sales just got worse and worse,” said Lu. “She [was running] her own business the whole time [which] was doing a lot better and was growing, so she decided to tap out.”
In December 2011, Lu bought out her business partner, and became the sole owner of Showpo. In the first month of running the business by herself, Lu was able to double the company’s sales to $9,000 a month, and two years later, Showpo hit a $1 million run rate.
Revealing the secret
Over the span of the first two years building Showpo, Lu kept it a secret that she had quit her corporate finance job. She was worried about disappointing or worrying her parents, but by 2012, the company was growing quickly and Lu finally decided to fess up.
“I remember us having half a million dollars sitting in stock, and I was like: ‘Okay, worst case scenario, I can sell all of this and start another business,’” Lu said. “That was a pinch me moment... [seeing that] no matter what happens, I’ve shifted the trajectory of my career.”
On Father’s Day, Lu brought her parents to a fine dining restaurant in Center Point Tower, one of the iconic buildings in Sydney, Australia, and broke the news.
“So I told them, and [said] that I was going to buy them a new car, because they’ve only had secondhand cars at this point... and then [also] that I was going to pay off their mortgage,” said Lu.
“They were just in shock,” she said. They couldn’t believe that Lu had just been pretending to go to work at her corporate job, when really, she had quit that job years ago.
“They’re like, that’s not possible. You were leaving home [to go to work]... like, it took a while to even convince them,” she said, but when the shock finally passed, they were very happy.
Today, Lu is a mother of two, and her husband has joined to work on Showpo full-time.
