A Smart Outfit

Fact file

Jane Cay

CEO and founder of Birdsnest, an online fashion retailer. Age 40. Lives in Cooma. She and her husband Oli have three children.

Business philosophies are to spend money to make money, you can’t sell out of an empty barrel and, if generous, good things will come. First job, at 12, was cleaning at Toyworld on Saturday mornings. Pastimes are limited to yoga and skiing.

- Alan Deans

As towns go, Cooma distinguishes itself in several ways. It’s the gateway to the Snowy Mountains ski fields, the base for the nearby Snowy hydro-electric scheme and it lies one hour south of Canberra along a straight, smooth highway. Farming is big. So, too, is online shopping. We’re not talking about isolated country folk eager to buy the latest gear from Amazon or Net-a-Porter. We’re talking their own home-grown internet star, Birdsnest, selling its fashion to the world.

It seems incredible that one of Australia’s major online retail successes hails from sheep country and employs nearly 150 townsfolk. Just one person, its buyer and production manager in Sydney, lives elsewhere. Birdsnest is one of the largest employers in a town with a population of some 6700, and it plans substantial growth.

“We are lucky because we are here,” Jane Cay, CEO and founder, says about Cooma. “While we work hard at our culture, the other part is there’s a great lifestyle. To live in place like this and come into a workplace that feels international and creative and innovative is what makes it.”

A lively, upbeat workplace is important. But there are other attributes. One is the location. Another is that Cay jumped online in 2008 when most other Australian fashion retailers were still focused on their big city stores. It helps to know her back-story.

Born in Cooma, her father Michael was an accountant servicing farming clients. Cay saw the hardship that country folk endured when, as a girl, her family moved to Moree and Dubbo as her father set up his business. “My mother grew up on a farm, and I thought I am never going to marry a farmer. It looks so hard, financially, emotionally, physically. I remember saying that to mum. The city held all of the opportunities career-wise, I thought as a naive teenager. I saw the bright lights of Sydney and said, ‘I’m off.’ ”