Culture of Creating New Ideas

Last question Luke; what did you learn at Naked in terms of the culture or any lessons that you have taken from Naked and that you are now applying today, in your new D2C business?

So much; it would be hard to get that into one thing. One thing is, when you get somebody into the right entrepreneurial culture that has the right purpose, where you can say you are doing something because it has a good purpose behind it, people within that business will come up with incredible ideas. If you can enable those ideas to be given life, your business will move forward faster.

Some of the ideas will be terrible, by the way, but you have to be willing to do that and hear them out. Every time somebody comes to you with a terrible idea, it’s an opportunity for you to share a bit of wisdom from your past, to inform that idea and speed them up. You can tell them, the reason that probably won’t work is because you haven’t considered this, this and this. That person walks away saying, next time, I’ll consider that. I think that Naked was amazing for that. Naked was amazing for people learning how to think up ideas within a business that weren’t just, I’ve got an idea. It was, I’ve got an idea and this is how it applies and this is how it becomes commercial and I’ve considered all of these things.

Because of that, although a few of us could probably say we were the founders of Naked, but actually, I believe that so many people should be confidently walking around saying, hey, I was the reason Naked became what it was. There is truth to that and I think that’s why Naked really succeeded and I would take that to every other business now; enabling people to be a part of the thought experiment that is a startup.

Letting them share in new ideas and, if they’re not great ideas, providing structure to make them reflect?

Yes; and showing them what a good idea really looks like. A good idea isn’t somewhere where everybody says, what a good idea. A good idea is something that actually gets implemented and hits a set of metrics and knows what those metrics are. Showing people that is critical.