Jane Lu, born in 1986, is the only child of immigrant parents. At the age of eight, she moved to Australia with her parents from China. Back then, she couldn’t speak English, and her parents had to work odd jobs for several years, striving to establish a new life in their adopted country.
According to CNBC, now at the age of 38, Jane is the founder and CEO of the online fashion retail company, Showpo, which generates annual revenue exceeding 100 million US dollars.
In addition to running a nine-figure enterprise, Jane currently serves as a judge on “Shark Tank Australia” and has amassed nearly 400,000 followers on her social media platforms.
Jane is ambitious and driven. In her first year of college, she landed a job at one of the Big Four accounting firms, KPMG. She worked there for about two and a half years before transitioning to Ernst & Young to work in finance while also managing her studies.
In 2009, a friend of Jane’s pitched a business idea to her – a concept for a pop-up store called “Fat Boye Group.” This business idea eventually became a side project for Jane.
Balancing her daytime corporate finance job with her evening business responsibilities, Jane would operate the physical pop-up store on weekends. “The operation of a pop-up store involves setting up and closing down every day, much like a lot of physical labor,” she said.
As Jane realized her passion for entrepreneurship, she also began to feel dissatisfied with her corporate job. “I used to see my corporate job as financial security, something that would prevent my parents and me from worrying about paying rent or mortgage… then suddenly, I saw it as a confinement,” she shared.
“I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents I had quit my job to sell clothes at a pop-up store,” she said. Every morning, Jane would wake up early, put on her suit, have breakfast with her parents, then sneak out after her mother went to work to spend the day working on Fat Boye Group.
After diving wholeheartedly into the business for about a month, Jane’s business partner decided to stop the venture. Lacking confidence to run the company alone, Jane closed Fat Boye Group in July 2010.
She found herself in debt of about $60,000 due to student loan debts, business losses, and more. Two months later, she met someone in the online fashion retail industry, and they hit it off immediately. “It was probably the third time I had met her when, after a few glasses of red wine, we came up with the store’s name and concept. I went home, still a bit tipsy, and built the website,” she recounted.
The new business partner decided on the name “Show Pony,” which was eventually shortened to “Showpo.” On the same weekend in September 2010, they did their first photoshoot, found suppliers, and made their first sales within a week.
About fifteen months later, Jane bought out her business partner’s stake and became the sole owner of Showpo. In the first month of running the business alone, she doubled the company’s sales to $9,000 per month. Two years later, Showpo’s revenue reached $1 million.
Today, Jane is a mother of two children, and her husband has also joined Showpo as a full-time employee.