Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce is an annual ranking of the most impressive and inspiring leaders in Australia’s online retail industry. Our 2024 report features C-level executives with decades of leadership experience, alongside start-up founders and digital specialists with a wide range of skills, from marketing to logistics. You can download it here.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing in-depth profiles of this year’s Top 10. Here’s the story of how #5, Sometimes Always’ head of digital Jared Brown got into e-commerce.

How did Jared Brown go from playing drums in Australian rock bands in his 20s to being one of this year’s Top 50 People in E-commerce? Like many industry leaders, it began with a flash of inspiration after making his first online sale and realising the endless possibilities of digital. 

“I was working in a music store in Adelaide, and I approached the boss about doing a website. I didn’t take it very seriously, but then one day, miraculously, someone from Queensland bought a guitar. I started pouring all of my time into [the site],” Brown told Inside Retail. 

“There was no e-commerce community back then, I was just trying to learn what worked and what didn’t and get more traffic. Analytics was bare bones, but the sales were happening.” 

After a few years, he decided to move to London to gain some international experience. This was the early 2010s, and the UK was much further along than Australia in terms of e-commerce adoption. 

He joined a luxury jewellery start-up, helping to build the business from scratch, and worked as a consultant before returning to Australia in 2013, where he eventually ended up at Australian Fashion Labels, a family business in Adelaide that operates five brands, including Finders Keepers, C/meo Collective, Keepsake and The Fifth, as well as a multibrand e-commerce site, Bnkr. 

“That was the juggernaut that just grew and grew,” Brown said about AFL. “We had global operations, with warehouses in Australia, Hong Kong, the UK and the US. Five regional storefronts with independent marketing and digital for each one. There were lots of moving parts, and it was incredibly intense, but incredibly cool because we had everything in-house.” 

By the time he left in 2019, the e-commerce side of the business was generating $20 million a year, and he was managing a large team of people. But he realised he missed being hands-on.  

“I’ve always seen myself as a practitioner. I love to push the buttons, pull the levers,” Brown said. “Because the e-commerce landscape changes so quickly, you need to do that to stay engaged. If not, you’ll fall behind. Someone else is looking at the new technology, someone else is noticing the trends.”

Small-business superpower

Around this time, he was approached by the owners of a winery in Adelaide who saw a gap in the market for an online wine retailer that was more curated than the big-box players but had a big enough range to appeal to a wide audience. 

“That got me really excited. Building something from scratch, starting a business with no customers? Sounds perfect,” Brown recalled laughing. 

The business is called Sometimes Always, and from the beginning, it was designed to stand out from the competition and solve many of the problems people encounter when buying wine online. 

“The site design was a very big thing. We wanted to have a brand that was identifiable and felt different from what was out there, so we didn’t buy a theme, everything was made from scratch,” Brown said. 

The team came up with icons to represent different flavours, such as cherry, black currant, mineral and spice, and a way to visually convey each wine’s structure: body, sweetness, tannin, acidity and alcohol. This information is also included in the ‘tech notes’ that come with every order. 

“We find that people end up keeping the tech notes of all their favourite wines, like a library of the bottles they’ve drunk,” Brown said. 

The team also photographs every bottle of wine it sells, which lends to a consistent look and feel on the website, and Brown sends a personalised video message to every new customer after they complete their first order.

“There are a lot of big players that have huge budgets, but as a smaller retailer, we can do things they’re unable to do. We need to use that as a superpower,” he explained.  

The personalised videos have generated positive feedback from customers, and Brown is looking to expand the strategy into other areas of the business this year. He is also interested in creating a type of subscription that gives customers the perk of membership without the financial commitment of a recurring payment. 

Success in e-commerce today, he believes, it’s all about staying close to the customer and finding ways to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. 

“People might say that I’m obsessed,” Brown said. “It’s probably true. I pick up live chats on the weekend. I get every single sales notification sent to my email. That’s how I learn. That’s how I see trends. That’s how I work out if we have a new market opening up.” 

There aren’t any shortcuts.