An Entrepreneurial Spirit, a Good Eye and Wifi
Lottie Rae is the owner of The Studio Trangie. A small and marvellous business that is the realisation of hard work, an entrepreneurial spirit and embracing digital business.
The day Lottie lost her admin job in 2018 she was having a commiseratory drink at her local pub. She was staring across the street to an almost condemned commercial building. In that moment, she saw an opportunity that would change her life.
"I called the owners of the building and said I wanted to buy it! They agreed and The Studio was born."
Lottie backed herself and invested every cent she had into the building. She and her husband spent their days converting the dilapidated building.
"I had very, very limited money and a very sad looking building. It was so basic but with the love of our incredible community it started to grow legs and with that money we slowly started funnelling that back into the store and doing improvements that we couldn't previously afford. There were months where I was literally working seven days a week on my own, juggling a family, married to a farmer. The hustle and hard work was so real."
With her natural eye for creating beautiful spaces, it quickly became a place that others wanted to enjoy. For a visit, for a coffee and to encourage Lottie's art venture. Soon enough, the cafe was born.
"I'd have people 'popping in' all day and at the time I had this crappy little home coffee machine to fuel my long days and people would be like "Oh I'll have a coffee with you while I'm here!!" So then was born the Espresso Bar."
"At this stage, I was working as a full time barista trying to get the business to the stage where I could pay someone to help out. I had slowly started introducing stock to try and gather a bit more income.
As the drought grew longer we felt the pinch of the communities pockets as people just couldn't afford to buy what they normally would like to. At the time, we really relied on foot traffic from our small town of 1,000 people.
I guess we were pretty lucky in that we had a range of different avenues that we could lean on to help prop up the shop (cafe, art, homewares) but this didn't mean we didn't feel the hurt of the drought. The cafe was a saviour as people in town with jobs that weren't agriculturally based were still about day to day and our farming community were still so supportive to us in that regard when they were in town."
"After the launch of BFTB, it became so incredibly obvious that we needed a website. Smack you in the face obvious. So, in true form I went home that night and built a website. I don't actually know how I did it, but I don't think I slept and I googled every single step and then launched the website the next day. I knew we needed it and I knew we needed it NOW. I could see the incredible opportunity that was presenting itself with BFTB and I knew if I didn't do it fast we would miss the boat."
"The drought was the grinch that stole Christmas, and Buy From The Bush was like Santa Claus turning up."
Everything I know about digital marketing has come from self-education. I read a lot at night, I enrol myself in online seminars, I google things like 'how to make your instagram grid look more appealing'. It's really important to me that I am across all of this stuff and that I do it all myself, because I think if you are asking someone to buy a product then the service needs to be personal and authentic."
"We wholeheartedly believe that regional women should not have their lifestyles or dreams limited because of where they live."
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