There comes a time in the life of a side hustle when its founder must decide whether or not to take the leap and pursue it wholeheartedly. For Chrissy Lafian of Melbourne-based lifestyle brand Suku, that moment came in 2016 when she was offered a retail space for her online-only business at No Order Market in Melbourne.
“I couldn’t be a sales assistant and do my full-time job,” she says. “I had a weekend to decide, and I couldn’t sleep. There were a lot of pros and cons.” She was working in fashion at the time, and her boss, who doubled as her mentor, told her to take the opportunity. “She said, ‘You can always come back to where you are now, but you won’t get this chance again,’” Lafian recalls.
At the time of the pop-up, Suku only sold bedding and sleepwear. “My thinking was there are different ways of showing your style, it doesn’t have to be just through what you wear,” she says. “It can be what your house or your room looks like. I wanted to create something fun and fashionable that wasn’t just about clothes, and I thought no one’s really done bedding or homewares, so I started there.”
Seven years later, her brand is a Melbourne staple, and the range has expanded to include lifestyle products and fashion.
Suku fuses Lafian’s Indonesian heritage with her love of the Australian lifestyle. All of her products, from miniskirts to king-size quilt covers, are made from fabrics beautifully hand-painted and hand-dyed in Indonesia by local artisans. The brand has a focus on being sustainable and ethical with a closed-loop production cycle, meaning all material used in the production can be recycled and used to create other products.
“It happened naturally,” she says. “We were getting our fabric there, producing it there and selling it in both countries. I thought, if we’re making something in Indonesia, we want to give back to that local community.” The brand regularly works with local charity Rice For Bali, an organisation that distributes rice and food to the community.
Taking advantage of opportunities as they come up – like her first retail space – and engaging with Suku’s diehard community have been two important factors in Lafian’s success.
“I believe so much in word-of-mouth marketing and looking after our community,” she says. “I come from a retail background, so making sure people’s experience when they come into the store is really, really good is important.”
She also believes in the power of pop-ups: beyond Melbourne, she’s had them in Sydney, Japan and Indonesia (which are now her two biggest markets outside of Australia). Although, Suku’s pop-up in the Japanese suburb of Harajuku was a slow burn.
“It wasn’t super successful at the time,” Lafian says. “But the year after, during Covid, we saw the results. Lots of people said, ‘I heard about your brand from my friend or from your pop-up,’ which they stumbled into.”
Suku isn’t alone in this experience – a recent survey from Xero found that 75 per cent of small business owners say word of mouth recommendations result in higher support for their business. Which is true for Lafian when she one day found that her website had been flooded with orders from Japan after unexpectedly featuring on the Youtube channel of one of the country’s biggest influencers.
“We walked into work one day and we had 20 orders from Japan, and it was like that the whole week,” she says. “That’s a lot when you’re a small business.”
Moving forward, she wants to continue collaborating with local Indonesian artists and supporting the brand’s close community both in Australia and internationally. “I don’t want to jinx it, but we’re a bit of a staple in the Melbourne scene,” she says. “Consistency is harder than anything else. I just want to keep making things that feel fun and great.”
This article was produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Xero.
