Athan Didaskalou: What I Wish People Knew About Breakthroughs
July began as a fledgling direct-to-consumer business trying to make better, affordable luggage and is now a multimillion-dollar global outfit. Co-founder Athan Didaskalou tells how.
You never know when a breakthrough is going to happen. There’s a saying that luck comes to the prepared. I would rephrase that: breakthroughs come to the prepared. Do the work, open yourself up to experimentation, be open with ideas but also do the groundwork, do the hard yards, listen to customers, respond to the tickets. Do all the things you need to do so that when luck does strike you’re able to take full advantage of it.
Richard [Li, co-founder] and I [pictured] are a couple of e-commerce guys who got ourselves into the luggage game. After talking to people in terms of how they buy luggage, we knew that physical retail was going to be a component of what we do. But we’d never done that before. We experimented with a store in Melbourne’s Emporium and it did exceptionally well. It was a pivotal moment in the business. The retail store made it feel like a real brand, not just a website brand. We were noticed because of the retail stock and we were able to raise capital. And now we’re 15 stores deep in locations around Australia. I would credit our current success to our retail strategy, which started from an idea – talking to customers.
A couple of years ago, we started developing a trackable TSA lock that’s integrated into the suitcase. It works with both the Apple Find My and Google Find Hub apps. Because the lock is integrated, you never forget it. Your case is always tracked. We developed the technology and we registered the IP. We’re innovating, we’re inventors now. We approached Qantas with it, saying, “Here’s a work in development. We would love to launch it with you.” And we worked together to launch CaseSafe, the world’s first integrated trackable suitcase. That means a lot to us.
There’s a product innovation component to what we do, which is making sure that the wheels are fantastic, the handle is great, the case is strong and we also have this technology component that sets us apart from everyone else in the world. The thing is that you don’t know what’s going to work until you try it so you should always be open to some level of experimentation, whether that’s in budget allocation or a mindset shift. There’s a sense of, “We don’t know what we don’t know so why don’t we experiment, try it out and see what happens.” We still do that to this day.
