The secrets to launching six successful businesses
Ana Piteira is the serial entrepreneur behind Blanca, Reliquia Jewellery and three other retail brands. She shares her tips.
You may not know her name, but you’re almost certainly familiar with Ana Piteira’s work. Her colourful, striped shirts have become a style staple – seen across Australia from bars to the beach – with a patchwork aesthetic that’s inspired countless imitations.
And yet, incredibly, right up until the moment Piteira launched her fashion label Blanca, she wasn’t sure it would be successful. “I just thought, ‘Let’s just put it online and see what happens. Maybe no one will like it.’”
“Everything is quite experimental for me,” she continues.
Blanca is the latest in a string of successful experiments for Piteira, who has established herself as one of Australia’s leading fashion entrepreneurs, having launched not one but four other brands – Reliquia Jewellery, Valet Studio, Respiro Studio and Aeyre Home – as well as a public relations agency, Sueno Communications.
Of all her brands, Blanca is the biggest, and Reliquia, a cool-girl, gold jewellery brand, the most established. Together, all five businesses confirm Piteira’s talent for identifying trends and building brands. Recently, Piteira moved to a dedicated 400sqm warehouse in Sydney to accommodate growth.
“I’m the kind of person who’ll say, ‘Yes’ and then work out how to do it later,” says Piteira of her ability to juggle five brands at once. “I just try and take every opportunity. I like learning on the job.”
“I’m the kind of person who’ll say, ‘Yes’ and then work out how to do it later.”
Building brands
A key part of Piteira’s success has been creating aspirational, distinctive – and distinct – brands. Early on, she decided that rather than launching one overarching business, offering jewellery, hair accessories and clothing, she would build individual brands, each with their own websites, social media followings and identities. Hence, Valet only produces hair accessories, Reliquia is known for gold jewellery and Aeyre only offers homewares.
“Reliquia was the first brand [I built] and I thought it had a really strong aesthetic and identity,” says Piteira. “I didn’t want to dilute that when I introduced Valet, which was next. Valet involved different materials – it was predominantly resin and really colourful and bright. I thought there would definitely be overlap, but I didn’t know that [the two brands] would necessarily [attract] the same girl.”
As it turned out, Reliquia performed strongly in Australia, whereas the more irreverent, playful Valet found greater international success, including with stockists like Selfridges and Liberty. “So, I think they are different customers and that ultimately it was the right decision to separate them,” she says.
Using content to engage customers
The benefit of building separate brands is that whenever Piteira launches a new business, she cross-promotes it to customers of her existing brands using content.
“We create a lot of content where we use the brands altogether and show the customer how it can be styled together. Our EDMs usually entail products from all our categories. We want to introduce our customers to the idea that we are a collective world, [and show that] you can seamlessly style everything together.”
The importance of User-Generated Content
As a public relations specialist, Piteira is, unsurprisingly, a huge proponent of PR. “I really believe in PR, obviously, but I think it’s an ever-changing environment. Its relevance is always shifting. When I started out it was all about print media. Now, it’s very much about digital and user-generated content (USG).”
"I really believe in PR, obviously, but I think it’s an ever-changing environment."
In fact, USG has played an important role in building all Piteira’s brands. “[User-generated content] is a ‘win-win.’ It’s really nice to see your brand being worn by different people in different ways… It’s a really fun and exciting way of getting content for a brand, [plus it’s amazing to see] the results it can drive.”
However, she adds that influencer marketing and USG only works when it’s authentic. “I think the audience now is super savvy. So, it’s about [knowing] where your brand is resonating with its audience, and finding the right partners [to collaborate with].”
Bricks-and-mortar benefits
Two years ago, Piteira took her first steps into brick-and-mortar retail and opened a boutique in Sydney’s Westfield Bondi Junction. She views the store, which is bright and colourful, as “an extension of [our] online presence”.
“I think the role of a physical store these days is quite different to how it used to be. It’s not only about the sales that you’re generating, it’s about having a showroom for your product where people can go and see, touch and feel the range,” she says, adding “I really do believe a lot of them go [into the store] and then purchase online”
“I think the role of a physical store these days is quite different."
Partnering wisely
Along with influencers and a physical presence, carefully chosen stockists have also played a key role in amplifying the brands. “We’ve been focused on wholesale from day one,” says Piteira, who was able to draw on her experience and contacts from her sales and PR business to get her brands into retailers like The ICONIC and David Jones.
“Stockists are really important in terms of being showrooms for your brand. There’s a customer discovery there that would perhaps not otherwise occur when you’re in different stores. I think it’s similar to working with influencers – it’s nice to see your product in different stores and to see buyers buy from a different perspective.”
Afterpay has been another key growth partner, says Piteira. “Afterpay is a really valuable service to a lot of customers. Customers love it, so in order to provide the best customer experience we partnered with [the BNPL platform].”
Piteira adds that there is a natural alignment between her brands and the Afterpay customer. “I think Afterpay has done a really amazing job of capturing the retail market and our customer is a pretty trend-driven customer, too.”
A renewed focus on retention
Heading into 2023, Piteira intends to double down on retention marketing. “We’re developing a loyalty program and we’ll be focusing on communicating directly with our customer and giving them content that is interesting to them and that they want to engage with without necessarily only pushing product all the time.”
With acquisition costs rising and inflationary pressures growing, she says that the days of driving revenue by investing only in Google or social media ads are over. “It’s going to require so much more effort to not only engage customers but then retain them. We want to shift our focus to looking after our customers and making sure that we continue to provide them with a good experience time and time again – not just once."
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