Posted by Nicholas Stabler | 29 January 2009

Lara Solomon

Mocks

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Tags: entrepreneur

Lara Solomon, winner of the NSW Telstra Micro Business Awards 2008, has struck gold when on a trip to Thailand she saw women, selling from street stalls, small stretchy socks for electronic devices. Lara decided to develop a higher quality product with designs more suited to the Australian market. Now she’s making a success of it - a million dollar success that is!

With valuable marketing and business experience under her belt (she was the Brand Manager at SC Johnson, Conair and Vidal Sassoon) Lara found the motivation to leave her high-profile career and took the plunge in March 2004 to start her own company, LaRoo and launched the product Mocks. The original mobile phone sock or “Mock” is now an iconic brand with over a million Mocks already sold worldwide in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA.

Lara’s new book - Brand New Day - the Highs and Lows of Starting a Small Business is a true, funny and brutally honest Bridget Jones’ Diary style account of starting a new business. Brand New Day follows Lara on her journey through the successful growth of her company LaRoo, as well as her compelling relationships with employees, friends and family. Readers experience a fly-on-the-wall view in to the mistakes she made along the way – sometimes at a huge expense.

You gained your inspiration for Mocks whilst holidaying in Thailand, what was it about the product which initially caused you to think it would be such a success?

The fact that one size fits all mobiles because they are stretchy. At the time I was really frustrated that I couldn’t get a case/cover for my phone. I also liked the idea that I could start a brand with one product and a few designs then expand the range.

Your business went through an extreme period of growth during the first nine months (averaging 46% monthly growth). Had you planned for your product to become so successful that quickly? How did you sustain this impressive growth rate?

I don’t have much patience, so I always wanted to achieve more and more in a short space of time. I hadn’t planned for the growth rate, but I had no doubt that the product would succeed. Sustaining the growth rate was just a case of me being impatient!

Having had such extensive experience with a number of high profile companies, did you find yourself well prepared for starting your own business?

Definitely. My background in marketing and experience with setting budgets, working with agencies and knowing people in different business areas helped me in that I had a wide network of people to talk to when I got stuck. I also think that working in a corporate structured environment meant I ran the business more like a big company than a small business from the start.

Did everything go to plan during the start-up phase of your business, or were there any unexpected difficulties?

The difficulties I had were once the orders started coming in - managing the Mock manufacturer in China was a huge challenge, I ended up taking a trip to China with 3 days notice as I hadn’t been able to contact my supplier for 8 days. I’d tried email, phone, sms and fax, so I decided the only thing for it was to get on a plane.

It must have taken a lot of courage to leave the relative security of your high profile job, in order to start your own business. Were you confident at that time that Mocks would be a success, or was it a leap of faith on your behalf?

I was confident that it would work, it sounds naïve, but I never thought it wouldn’t work. I was also lucky in that at the time I was married, and my husband earnt enough to support both of us for a short time. Plus I had a part-time temp role for the first six months.

If you could go back to 2004 and have a conversation with the younger you, what is the one piece of advice you would give yourself before beginning your journey as an entrepreneur?

Take time to think through decisions and don’t rush into things, in other words curb your impatience. Take some courses in managing people before starting to hire staff! Stop from time to time and enjoy the wins…

 

Find out more about Lara’s book at the Brand New Day website.

Or you can buy it from Amazon.