Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show
Add To Cart is Australia’s leading eCommerce podcast
Hosted by eCommerce expert Nathan Bush, this show express-delivers insights, strategies, and stories from the frontlines of online retail. Tune in every Monday for deep-dive interviews with eCommerce leaders, and every Friday for our signature 'Checkout' episodes - quick, actionable takes on what’s trending in eCommerce, retail, and digital marketing.
If you're growing a Shopify store, leading a retail team, or just trying to stay one step ahead, Add To Cart helps you stay sharp, confident, and up-skilled without the guesswork.
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Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show
Rosie Collins from Deja Marc | #550
In this Checkout episode, we go behind the scenes with Rosie Collins, Founder of personalised jewellery brand Deja Marc, a business known for turning sentimental moments into lasting pieces, and doing it all with lean systems and a strong sense of purpose.
Today, we’re discussing:
- Why Rosie has never been served an Instagram ad (true story)
- The retailers inspiring her right now, including Mecca and Oroton
- How she’s experimenting with new personalisation tools in Shopify
- Building stronger customer connections through personalisation
- Her refreshing take on work-life design as a founder and mum
- Self-care routines: tea and walks as daily resets
- Strategies she uses to keep burnout at bay
- Leading a high-growth personalised jewellery brand while growing baby number two
Want the full story behind Deja Marc’s rise?
Listen to Rosie’s main episode, here.
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Speaker 1: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. Today's checkout features Rosie Collins, founder and CEO of Deja Mark. Deja Mark is a personalized jewelry brand that captures fingerprints, handwriting and even paw prints in keepsakes that will hold a special place in people's hearts. What started as a deeply sentimental gift idea has grown into a global brand with over 150,000 Instagram followers, a Westfield Bondi Junction studio and customers that are across Australia, the UK, us and more.
Speaker 1:In this checkout you'll hear why Rosie's never bought anything weird online Spoiler. It might not be self-control. It might be what she sees the retailer comeback story that she's loving right now and how she spots the early signs of burnout before they take hold. Rosie, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. We had an amazing conversation in our main episode where you shared the incredible story of how you've built Dajamar from a media agency background, going into creating this personalized jewelry brand that is now got over 150,000 followers on Instagram, had your first TikTok go viral to just a few million people and now in countries all over the world, including expansions into the US and the UK. Incredible story so far, but we're here to learn more about you, so I've got five quick questions. Okay, number one what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Speaker 2:That's a deeply personal question, Nathan.
Speaker 1:That's when I know we've got the good stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to tell you a fun fact is that I don't get served Instagram ads. So I would say that I haven't really ever bought anything weird online because I've never been tempted or know about potentially, any of these unique, weird products. And I know you're thinking how can she not be targeted with Instagram ads on my phone? But I will give it to you next time and you will see for yourself. I'm just in one of those weird cohorts that I have never seen an ad on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Stop it. No, have you got like blocker technology?
Speaker 2:or something. No, I want them. I need them as a mum.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I also need it as a founder to kind of keep up with what's going on from an ads point of view. But no, I don't. I'd have to create a separate account in order to see them. So I see them on the business account, but I don't see them on my personal account.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, interesting, all right, so you haven't been lured into weird things.
Speaker 2:I've not been lured, no.
Speaker 1:Number two which retailer has most inspired you recently?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean I touched upon Peanut as a brand that I love. I would also say Oraton is a retailer who has just done some transformational work, incredible comeback. Done some transformational work, incredible comeback, yeah, incredible comeback. And the importance of community and the in-store experience would lead me to then say Mecca, how they're just able to have such a strong community online, offline, in person and kind of just doing the full circle, Does the Mecca business model, because they do invest so much into retention and community but they operate on pretty slim margins.
Speaker 1:Obviously they're a huge base, so slim margins add up to a lot, but how does that resonate with what you're building? Would you rather sacrifice margin for customer experience that we talked about, and also in retention and rewarding customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, with the community. Going back to what I explained in the main episode, I think there are ways that you can do it at a high frequency, low cost, by making it no fluff and meaningful for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:So as a business, I would probably always choose the smart, which. Well, I think the smart choice is just making sure you can sustainably grow by having healthy margins and strong profit. I wouldn't shift too much into doing the fancy events that kind of suck all your money, and they still need to have meaning for your customer, and I think there's ways that you can do it by making it purely about them and removing a lot of the expense around that I really liked our conversation earlier and, even though you said that you're very much a strategic chess playing founder, you love being, you know, looking down there.
Speaker 1:It's also that you approach, how you communicate. The storytelling is one, but you can't rely on storytelling for the forever customer. You actually have to, you know, do the conversion piece as well, which I thought was really interesting from that point of view. Sure, number three can you name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without?
Speaker 2:Is Shopify really boring to say no, it's essential, it's pretty obvious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. Is there an app on Shopify that you're loving?
Speaker 2:Do you know what we are actually just about to test? So I can't give you a confident answer on this one, because I haven't tested it to know whether it works. But conceptually, we are just about to test a new piece of personalization technology that will enable us to have a much more resonant strike rate with our customers, if that makes sense, so from an email marketing perspective it's smart audiences that enable us to target our audience at a much deeper personalization level.
Speaker 1:I'm putting the pieces together in my head to try and work out who it is.
Speaker 2:Putting the pieces together. Yeah, okay. So yeah, the concept of that is really exciting, okay, Awesome, and is that about identifying unknown audiences? Potentially All right, let's move on.
Speaker 1:Number four can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I have so many, so yours obviously. So I listen to Diary of a CEO, which obviously most people would know about Emma Greed's new podcast, which I believe is called Aspire. I might have got that wrong, but just yeah, look Emma Greed, she's fantastic. She's the one that I'm loving at the moment, to be honest.
Speaker 1:What do you go to? Probably she's the one that I'm loving at the moment, to be honest. What do you go to, because it sounds like you've got a lot going on in your life. What do you go to to tune out and relax?
Speaker 2:I love walking. Yeah, and like walking with a podcast is probably at by the beach is probably the peak of existence right now. For me, it's definitely followed by a good sleep followed by a good sleep and a cup of tea. Honestly simple life pleasures that's the top three for me.
Speaker 1:Love it All right. Last question I've got for you, Rosie what is your biggest challenge today?
Speaker 2:The juggle it really is, because if you get it I don't want to say get it wrong If you mismanage, then you're just exhausted and it can lead to burnout. And I've had that when I was in my advertising days. I just pushed myself too hard and once you can't get out of it, you're just stuck in that, unless you quit your job or have a breakdown, which you don't really want to do any of them. So for me, not ideal. I'm constantly thinking about how I can manage everything.
Speaker 1:How do you recognize signs of burnout?
Speaker 2:Sleep, sleep and not sleeping enough, and just your brain not really functioning properly. You know whether you're in a conversation with someone and a couple of months ago you could have that conversation and now you can't. Yeah, whether you're eating eating properly, like just good habits, whether they're falling to the side yeah, they're probably just like the basic kind of standard health metrics.
Speaker 1:Love it, Rosie. Thank you so much for joining us on the Checkout.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:If that conversation with Rosie left you wanting more of Rosie's wisdom, don't miss the main episode, number 532 of Add to Cart, where Rosie shares how she scaled a personalized product without compromising on quality. She talks about how she structured her business to be able to step away from it for maternity leave and why growing for her is just about alignment to her life values, as it is about revenue for a business. The link is in the episode description. Well worth a listen if you're trying to balance growth with values or build a brand. That actually means something. If you haven't already, I invite you to come in and join the Add to Cart community. It's free and it's full of e-commerce professionals like you. It's where we go deeper on conversations from episodes like this and we share tips and solve problems together. Join us at addtocartcomau.