Jane Lu social entrepreneurship - a true social media success story

Social Media Success Story

Jane Lu embodies the entrepreneurial dream of the social media age. The 27 year old immigrated to Australia with her parents when she was just eight years of age, and her good education ensured that at 18 she was working at KPMG through a cadetship programme. She was on course to secure a very healthy corporate career, but Lu was determined to secure success elsewhere.

After three successful years in the corporate world, Lu began to find herself low on enthusiasm, and was bored sitting in her dull grey cubicle working on spreadsheets all day. Although she had an upbringing that suggested that she should pursue a career in the corporate industry, she desired more excitement and autonomy in her work.

Lu was travelling for nine months across the world, and having visited 40 countries, she could not begin to imagine going back to pursue a career at a desk in the traditional manner that many people do.

Fashion was calling and social media was at hand to help, and Lu stated “I spent most of my time surfing Facebook and shopping online – and really struggled to find a store that was on-trend, had quick delivery so I could get something to wear for that Friday night out, and that wasn’t going to eat up my entire entry-level pay check.”

With these concerns in mind and an appetite for business, she came up with the idea to start a fashion retail business providing fashionable and affordable attire and accessories for females. After generating the idea she named the company Show Pony aka SHOWPO.

SHOWPO was not the first business venture by Jane Lu, and prior to this she started another business with two other partners but it was a disaster from the outset. Lu acknowledged this and said, “It was a bad idea that was poorly executed. But of course, I learned more from it than I did from my university degree or my work experience.”

This would have put a lot of people off as bad experiences do, especially in business, but she took the plunge back into entrepreneurship. This was no easy decision due to failure the first time and her education pushing her into something completely different: “You can imagine how hard it was to decide whether I should quit my job and follow my dreams.”

“The fact that it was during the global financial crisis when everyone was just trying to not get laid off made it even harder. I just couldn’t imagine telling my parents – so I didn’t. So for the first six months of starting the business, I just pretended to go to work every day. I was still living at home, so I got up early every day, put on my suit and went off into the city.”

Despite deceiving her parents, she struck gold with SHOWPO and social media was a massive factor in the instantaneous success that her business was exposed to. She was unable to afford traditional marketing so Lu relied solely on social media to get the company recognized.

One of the first ways she did this was creating a competition for ‘the face of SHOWPO’ and she stated “We were looking for a model and thought we would run a model search and open it up to our 3,000 Facebook fans and their friends. We had over 350 applicants and as their friends started voting, our fan count grew from 3,000 to 20,000 within a month – and what did it cost me? Nothing!”

Her social media presence grew as Lu captured a niche in the market, offering free express shipping across Australia and delivery within one or two business days. With the clothing price capped at $70, SHOWPO ensured that women of all budgets were catered for in a time of tough economical environments.

SHOWPO now has 352,000 Likes on Facebook and 357,000 followers on Instagram. This shows that social media can be crucial if starting up a business with a low budget. Because she used networking from the very start, Jane Lu is now trusted in those sectors by people in that industry, and as the retail world moves forward in terms of social media, this stands SHOWPO in a very strong position in the future.

Alex Smith

Alex is an English Literature and Sociology undergraduate whose love for written word has led him to write about some obscure topics in his time. Currently a content writer at Social Media Frontiers, be sure to follow him @AlexSatSMF.

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