Justin Irvine from The Aggregate Co | #548

Justin Irvine is the Co-Founder of The Aggregate Co, the behind-the-scenes ops partner trusted by some of Australia’s most recognisable ecommerce brands, including Showpo, Meshki, Oz Hair and Culture Kings. Known for shaving costs, streamlining fulfilment and turning CX into a strategic weapon, Justin’s helped move over a billion dollars in ecommerce GVM. And he’s not slowing down.

Today, we’re discussing…

• The quirky neck-mounted light that’s pure ops thinking in disguise
• How Betts Footwear is reinventing itself after 130 years in retail
• Building a BI stack that actually drives profit, not just pretty charts
• Why SKU-level data is the secret to scaling without margin leaks
• Lessons from scaling The Aggregate Co at lightning speed

Chapters

• 0:00 StudioHawk SEO Sponsor Message

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Calling all brands looking to dominate search rankings in 2025. And who isn't? Studiohawk is Australia's largest dedicated SEO agency and are working with brands like Officeworks, citybeach, age Clarks, petstock and New Balance, and they have an exclusive offer just for Add to Cart listeners. Sign up for an ongoing SEO campaign with StudioHawk and receive the content boost package for free of charge. This is professionally written copy for 40 category pages free of charge, with an ongoing SEO campaign. If you want to rank and convert better in 2025, head on over to studiohawkcomau that's studiohawkcomau and mention Add to Cart when inquiring to claim this offer. Plus, receive a free SEO audit of your website. How good's that.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Welcome to the Checkout. We catch up with previous Add to Cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Today's Checkout features Justin Irvine, co-founder and partner at the Aggregate Co. He is the man behind the scenes of some of Australia's smartest, most scalable and profitable retail operations in Meshki, shopo, ozher and Beauty and Culture Kings. Before he was steering $1.2 billion in GMV for his clients and dissecting freight contracts like a little bit of a retail surgeon, justin was just a bloke trying to make sense of parcels, people and processes. These days, he's helping brands turn their backend into a brand advantage and a profitable machine. In this chat, we get a peek behind the curtain into what makes Justin tick. You're going to hear why he's ditched the humble head torch for something better, what piece of tech fuels every decision that he makes and the one product category that he wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole if he was launching a new business today.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Justin, welcome to the Checkout. We are doing this live from Retail Fest on the Gold Coast. Yeah, we heard a lot about what you've built with the Aggregate Co, which is really exciting, and you were kind enough to share with us a lot of information around how retailers in 2025 need to think about everything from selecting carriers to trying to make sense of what's happening with tariffs around the world and how to use stores as a competitive advantage when it comes to operations and fulfillment. So much in that main chat. But I want to learn more about you, so I've got five quick questions. But I want to learn more about you, so I've got five quick questions. All right, number one what's the weirdest?

Speaker 3: 2:50

thing that you've ever bought online. Oh, geez, I don't know. I'm trying to think. Usually, jeff and Kai buy weird stuff and I just feel like shaking my head. Weirdest thing oh, when I go camping and hiking, there's like this wraparound light thing, so it hangs around your neck. So instead of a head torch, you have this like thing with like wraps around your neck and has two lights on each side of it. Yeah, so that you don't have to worry about a head torch. You just got this on and you can cook on your barbecue at night and stuff like that. That sounds safe and practical, not weird. That makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3: 3:27

Sorry, that's about as weird as it gets, or that you're going to share.

Speaker 1: 3:28

Yeah, well, that's exactly right, all right. Number two which retailer has most inspired? You recently?

Speaker 3: 3:33

going back to our, our main convo definitely bets footwear. At the moment we work with a ton of brands that are doing very exciting stuff, but the way that michael is reinventing that legendary whole of Australian timeline business that goes back to the 1800s like that approach that he's taking and the way it's grown and how we're now involved in that transformation, is like easily the most exciting thing we've got going on right now. That's cool Hands down.

Speaker 1: 4:05

If you were to this isn't one of the five questions, by the way knowing everything that you know around operations and fulfillment, if you were to start an e-commerce business today, which category would you go into? Uh?

Speaker 3: 4:16

not fashion and apparel. I would say some level of health and beauty supplement, something like that. Yeah, that's, that would be low skew count, small light Small light, high revenue output. Replenishable. Strong AOVs yeah, easy to replicate. Local manufacturer yeah, all those. We've got a couple of really great brands that do that, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Fantastic, All right. Number three Name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without.

Speaker 3: 4:47

So our BI, which is a construct of a couple of things. So we use Alteryx, tableau and Snowflake to basically pull together all of our key carrier data, invoice data. It drives every decision we make. We wouldn't be able to live without that hands down. It's all our own IP. It's off the shelf stuff, but it's what you put into it that creates the magic. Yeah, so that for us, is a non-negotiable.

Speaker 1: 5:15

I can imagine, across all your clients. You'd have some pretty crazy data at your fingertips to compare across the industry.

Speaker 3: 5:21

Yeah, we laugh about it because if we were a freight company we would be an $80 million business inside two years. Oh wow, that's how much freight we carry and manage. And yeah, we're tracking at 1.2 billion in australian gmv that we have an involvement and movement of. So it's pretty crazy. Are you using any ai tools to?

Speaker 3: 5:42

try we literally got contractors in right now picking apart everything we do in our business. If you're not doing that today, we're already too far behind, in my view. But yeah, so we've. We've got people coming in and creating agents for everything, including even the pre-work before it gets to the BI.

Speaker 1: 5:59

Fantastic, all right. Number four can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?

Speaker 3: 6:05

It's pretty like there's a couple here. I's I'm a big fan of Scott Galloway. I love his very upfront and unapologetic view to life, but I think there's some real nuggets there that he shares. I'm a big fan of the Diary of a CEO. Yep, I was gutted. I missed him in Australia, actually while I was here, and then I've actually I take parts of it. But Dan Martell's book that he put out something about getting your time back, which I probably should pay attention to the title Again, I love the way he structures and thinks around systems and he talks a lot about a goal is a goal, a goal is a wish, unless put structure, framework and like accountability behind it. So you know, for me those three are different views, different stuff coming in. But yeah, I really enjoy that.

Speaker 1: 6:59

yeah, that's cool, great suggestions. Last one I've got for you what is your biggest?

Speaker 3: 7:04

challenge today. Uh, I need a hot tub time machine to go back in time.

Speaker 3: 7:09

Yeah every day so I can redo the day again because I just don't have enough time in my day. So, yeah, for me, I've got incredible team, we've got more people coming in. At the moment it's literally just getting a hold of this. We've doubled the business in four months. It's just, you know, it's a very similar journey in a lot of ways to what we did at Seco, where we just were like growing double, double, double. But I feel like if we can just get the resourcing and the right people underway, then we can fulfill under it with AI and, again, you know, good intermediate and junior staffing. Yeah, for me it's just getting, it's riding the wave and getting ahead of it without sinking too much into resources, just that delicate balancing all that in your sanity.

Speaker 3: 7:57

Yeah, yeah, although that's gone, that went back in 2016. I don't like that went with pride and dignity and sanity. They all went at the same time and now you're on our ducats it all makes sense, justin. Thank you so much for joining us you're welcome, no worries.

Speaker 1: 8:16

If you left that chat thinking I wouldn't mind having Justin on speed dial. I don't think you're alone. In the main episode with Justin, episode 530 of Add to Cart we dive a hell of a lot deeper into Justin's knowledge and expertise around logistics, operations and fulfillment. He gives away so much of his IP there and he talks about how to make carrier contracts work for you, not against you, how to build loyalty programs with operational perks instead of just discounts, and why cubic volume is the sneaky metric that could be draining your margin.

Speaker 1: 8:53

If you're looking to scale without the chaos or if you just want to stop bleeding money on fulfillment that isn't adding anything to your life or your business, make sure you go check out that episode, number 530. Link is in the description of this episode and this is an open invitation to you. If you are ready to be part of something bigger, come and join the Add to Cart community today, where we've got over 300 e-commerce professionals in there sharing insights from episodes like this one, asking smart questions and connecting over all the practical stuff in e-com. It's free, it's useful and that's where this conversation continues. Join us at addicardcomau and look for the community.