Olivya Munro
So Zello is a fitting room assistant for fashion retailers.

Alan Jones
So you're just swiping through inventory, finding the blouse.

Olivya Munro
I left the fitting room. I actually left the store without buying anything.

Alan Jones
The person who actually uses the service is always a really important place to start.

Olivya Munro
We've already got five of Australia's biggest retailers in our pipeline.

Alan Jones
Cross my arms like a sceptical middle-aged white man. Give me your best pitch. Welcome to another episode of Pick My Brain, a podcast where founders pitch their startup. And I try to give them some useful advice on how to improve their pitch so that they can connect better with potential co-founders, investors, media, and customers.

Alan Jones
My name's Alan Jones, and I was a founder myself for about 15 years. And after that, an angel investor for another 15 years. So yes, I'm very old. Some of my inventions have been successful, and some have failed disastrously, but perhaps I've learned a thing or two along the way. And maybe some of that can help you, here on Pick My Brain Podcast.

Alan Jones
On today's episode of Pick My Brain, we'll be joined by Olivia Munro of Zello Studio. But before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm recording on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I'd like to recognise their leaders and innovators past, present, and emerging. Always was. And this will be Aboriginal land.

Alan Jones
Olivia, thank you for joining me on Pick My Brain today.

Olivya Munro
Hello. Thank you for having me.

Alan Jones
Can I ask you a couple of, uh, warm-up questions before we begin? Of course. When you were little, what did you think you'd be when you grew up?

Olivya Munro
I actually wanted to be a fashion designer in Paris. I'd actually designed my own fashion studio called Oliviana's Designs.

Olivya Munro
Um, yeah. But you've never imagined that I'd be in the tech space, but here I am.

Alan Jones
You are. Well, I thought I wanted to be a long-distance truck driver. Way off brief. I have another question, um, and then we have a third question, we'll come back to you at the end of the episode. What were you doing before Zello Studio and how did that lead to this?

Olivya Munro
Yeah, well, I was actually working in PR and comms for a range of B2B tech startups, um, and I just became obsessed with the space. I spoke to a lot of founders, interviewed a lot of founders in my job, and I just really, I just felt called to the startup ecosystem. And when I came up with the idea for Zello, I just knew it's where I wanted to go.

Alan Jones
That's awesome. Now, I saw you on stage at Startmate Demo Day, the most recent cohort that graduated. I'm here. Um, so I know for a fact that on the big stage, under all the lights in front of a room of 1500 people, you can acquit yourself very capably indeed. Um, but I am hoping that maybe if we work through the kind of pitch that you have when you're having a meeting with someone, that maybe I might have some advice or support for you in that area too.

Alan Jones
Would that be cool?

Olivya Munro
That'd be amazing. Thank you.

Alan Jones
No worries. Now, let's think about who ideally, you know, who's this pitch for, like, who do you most want to connect with in your near-term goals?

Olivya Munro
Yeah, we really want to connect with people working in fashion retailers and anyone on the operations side of things, so heads of retail, chief operating officer, national operations manager, anyone in that space.

Alan Jones
Great. Okay. With that framing in place, let's, let's, let's kind of go. If you're going to sit back and cross my arms like a sceptical middle-aged white man.

Olivya Munro
Give me your best pitch.

Olivya Munro
Yeah, done. Um, so Zello is a fitting room assistant for fashion retailers. And the way we originally came up with this idea was at the start of 2024.

Olivya Munro
So around Christmas time last year. And I was shopping in store and went to a fitting room, couldn't find any of the items that I wanted when I was in the fitting room. I tried on items, they weren't my size. And it was just a really messy, messy experience. I couldn't get assistance from anybody when I needed help.

Olivya Munro
And I was just stuck in the fitting room. So I had to put my clothes back on, go back outside of the fitting room. When I did find the items that I wanted myself, I went back to the fitting room and realised it was a huge line and I just couldn't be bothered trying anything on. So I left the fitting room, I left the store actually, without buying anything.

Olivya Munro
And it just got me thinking, how many other shoppers do this, and how much money is it actually costing the fashion retailers? And that's when I started speaking to a whole heap of fashion retailers and shoppers. And we found that 91 percent of shoppers are dissatisfied with their fitting room experience in one way or another.

Olivya Munro
And given that 70 percent of purchasing decisions are made in the fitting rooms, I found that this just didn't add up. Why, why was it such a messy experience and why do we use tech in every other aspect of our lives? But yet, when we go into a fitting room, we still do it the same way that we did in 1920.

Olivya Munro
And it really got me thinking and that's how we came up with the idea for a fitting room assistant. But then when speaking to the retailers, we learned that they actually have no way of getting data of what goes in and out of the fitting rooms. Alternately, the fitting rooms, a black hole for them.

Olivya Munro
And so yes, we are a fitting room assistant, but we're a fitting room assistant for fashion retailers because we provide them with the data of what's going in and out, what's most popular, what items are least popular, what items are being tried on, but then not converting to purchases. Because at the moment they get that data just from store managers sending an email at the end of a shift.

Olivya Munro
And it's really anecdotal. And they use this data for a whole heap of decision making. And so we provide an admin dashboard to them that essentially gives them this data in a really easy to understand form. And everyone can access the same data. And how it works. So, what Zello is, it's an app that's downloaded on a tablet and essentially the tablet is mounted onto the wall inside of fitting room.

Olivya Munro
So let's just say, you walk into a fitting room with a blue t-shirt and you go in there and you realise that the size you've tried on that you've brought in isn't correct. You can then scan that blue t-shirt into the Zello tablet and it'll pop up on the screen and you can then request a size medium, essentially.

Olivya Munro
That will then send a notification to the staff members who are on the floor to a device that they're carrying around. And it'll pop up and it'll say, Alan in fitting room number one has requested this blue t-shirt in size medium. And so while you're inside the fitting rooms. And you're wondering, Oh, I need a new size.

Olivya Munro
You're not thinking, how am I going to get the new size? You're thinking, what else do I need to buy? What, what events do I have coming up that I need an outfit for? Is that the purchasing decision-making is happening rather than the anxiety of I'm standing in the studio, half naked. That anxiety thoughts happening, and that's essentially how it works.

Olivya Munro
There's also a styling feature, which acts as an upsell feature as well to get, shoppers to try on as many items while they're in the fitting room, which then as a result increases the basket size for the shop, for the retailers. And then as a result, they make more money out of the shoppers from there.

Alan Jones
Great. Thanks, Olivia.

Olivya Munro
Yeah, that's essentially how Zalo works.

Alan Jones
I get how it works. Should I be a fashion retail operations person? I, there's not something I've ever done before. But a few questions arose in my mind.

Olivya Munro
Yeah.

Alan Jones
And first, you know, I just want to score a cheat point and say, find yourself a boy or girl who loves you so much that they'll go and fetch those different sizes for you from the rack.

Alan Jones
I mean, that's true love.

Olivya Munro
The boyfriend seat.

Alan Jones
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Olivya Munro
Yep.

Alan Jones
Yep. Yep. I have a photo of like three boyfriends all sitting on the bench outside the change rooms.

Olivya Munro
It's funny you say that retailers are actually creating their fitting rooms around having a boyfriend seat now so that because they know how big of a problem it is in the sense that boyfriends come in and they've got nowhere to sit so they just stand in the corner on their phones whereas so it's actually funny it's funny you say that that's definitely a thing.

Alan Jones
We need good free Wi-Fi.

Olivya Munro
Exactly.

Alan Jones
Whether it's boyfriends or girlfriends, we need good free Wi-Fi, because it takes a while in between requests to go and get a different size. But I imagine, putting screens on walls in fitting rooms, I imagine that the fashion retail industry at the moment doesn't spend an enormous amount of interior design budget on, like a lot of fitting rooms seem to be just some cheap chipboard and a couple of cheap curtains with a stream.

Alan Jones
In the conversations we've had so far, people are ready to put tablets up on the wall.

Olivya Munro
Yeah, so it's not that, a lot of people are surprised it doesn't actually involve that much damage to the walls. All it basically is, so we partner with a company who popped the tablet in a theft and damage proof case, and then it gets mounted to the wall through just a simple connector, which puts like a small hole into the wall.

Olivya Munro
And it just gets screwed in that way. And it can be easily plastered up or removed if the store's been changed around. It's also not that expensive. So you're right, retailers don't want to put a whole heap of money into the interior design of their fitting rooms. And it's only about 150 to install the theft and damage-proof case on the wall.

Alan Jones
I know the camera and the tablet is, this is just taking a photo or video to tell what garment I'm currently wearing. But in your personal research, is there any hesitation from fashion consumers about pressing a photo button? Somebody's going to take a photo of me while I'm still undressed in the changing room.

Olivya Munro
Yeah. So actually we don't take any photos of the shoppers. The way Zella works is it doesn't actually show you what the items look like on your body yet. We did plan to go into augmented reality in the future, but at this stage, it's more of a browsing and a styling tool. So the cameras aren't active and the tablets are locked.

Olivya Munro
So people can't go in there and take photos of themselves like you do when you go into an Apple store. It's very secure, very locked. You need a password, which only the retailers have to access that.

Alan Jones
So you're just swiping through inventory, finding the blouse that you've gotten and choosing a different size.

Olivya Munro
Yep. It essentially looks like the retailer's website and you can just browse through the items as if you were in your bed at home.

Alan Jones
Gotcha. And then the device that the sales assistant is carrying around, is that just their own mobile phone with a phone version of the app?

Olivya Munro
No. So a lot of retailers actually use devices already and have the retail assistants carry around devices. So for example, Cotton on use, their devices, which they called a Moby device. And essentially it's just an Android phone and they use it for inventory and stock management. And Zello just fits seamlessly into there by it's just an app that's downloaded onto the phone.

Olivya Munro
And then the notification comes through that way.

Alan Jones
How much progress have you made towards bringing this to market? Where are you in developing the product and commercialisation?

Olivya Munro
Yeah, so at the start of August, we had no product, we then built out our MVP in four weeks and launched in-store in Cavari, which, at the start of October, which has been really exciting, that's in their Pacific Fair store, so on the Gold Coast.

Olivya Munro
And we are also in talks with a couple of other large retailers, which unfortunately I can't say on the podcast, but we are working with one of Australia's largest retailers at the start of 2025, which is super exciting. I think they're also a huge brand that is in need of a shakeup when it comes to their store experience and digital innovation and targeting the younger generation.

Olivya Munro
So that's really exciting and to see how that goes with them.

Alan Jones
Cool. So, Olivia, thanks very much, with me role-playing a fashion operations executive, that's about as deep as I can go. I bet they'd have way more questions than me. But I wanted to give you some feedback on the pitch, which I think is great.

Alan Jones
You're off to a quite fun start. So one challenge that a lot of people have is that it's hard for them to get out of the product part of the story, I want to tell you more and more about what's in the software or what's in the hardware, how these pieces communicate with each other and way too much detail about all the data that's being collected and the ARPU and the TAC and LTV, you connect immediately with the problem of the end consumer, right?

Alan Jones
And without that customer, you know, they're not paying to use the service, but the person who actually uses the service is always a really important place to start because unless we understand and we believe that we're solving a valuable problem for them, then none of the rest of it stacks up.

Alan Jones
Right. So I think that's a really great place to begin the story. I think another really great thing about your story is when I started asking you questions, even though I'm clearly not a fashion industry executive, I'm wearing a t-shirt that I printed myself. Yeah. So even though it was just role-playing, like you didn't, you know, sometimes people can be a bit combative.

Alan Jones
When a startup investor, for instance, is throwing in some questions to kind of test some of your assumptions, oftentimes a founder can be a little threatened by that or a little defensive about that or a little aggressive sometimes, and there was nothing about that in the way that you answered the questions that I had, you know, confident, you know, really great balance of confidence, industry knowledge, and clarity and conciseness.

Alan Jones
All of that stands in your favour, and I think that probably comes from your background in communications.

Olivya Munro
Thank you.

Alan Jones
So, a lot of people could learn a lot from how you manage that. I think, for me, the one thing that I'd love to add to the next version of this pitch would be those things around where I deliver the questions.

Alan Jones
So, there's a delicate balance between anticipating all the questions that are likely to come up and answering them in advance. We don't want to do too much of that, because oftentimes our audience won't have thought of those questions themselves. And so if you answer them, you don't have to go, well, maybe, you know, there's other questions I should be thinking of.

Alan Jones
And that can make some people, you know, paranoid and start digging deeper than they really otherwise would. But at the same time, I think it would be helpful, you know, Fashion retail is not on the bleeding edge of technology most of the time and, and, it might help to tell those people to give them a quick highlight view of where you are in terms of bringing this to market, you know, so towards the end of your pitch, we're already in store on the Gold Coast with Retailer.

Alan Jones
No. And I can't tell you who right now, because we're under NDA, but we have a major retailer that's about to come on board with us, or a letter of intent stage, or something like that. And maybe you could talk about the fact that they are national, if they are national, or international, if they are international.

Alan Jones
Or maybe how many, you know, roughly how many outlets they might have, you know, like if you said greater than 200 outlets, that would kind of give other fashion industry people a sense for most people would assume you're starting with a little retailers and getting big. If you're already talking to big retailers, then that's either a sign that you're really good at this or that you're solving a really valuable problem.

Alan Jones
And big players in the industry already see potential for that. Either of those two signals would be great.

Olivya Munro
Yeah. No, thank you.

Alan Jones
Was that helpful? Do you have any questions for me about your pitch?

Olivya Munro
No, that was really, really helpful. Um, if you were an investor, what would be the number one thing that you would want to know from me after that pitch?

Alan Jones
So, the number one thing was literally progress towards commercialisation.

Olivya Munro
Yeah.

Alan Jones
Often, I probably wouldn't do this, but many investors will want to know. There's something about the commercial value of these relationships, you know, so what do you think the commercial model is going to be?

Alan Jones
Are you going to be charging per screen or per venue or per number of lookups, you know, or whether you make If you increase the shopping basket? If you increase the average shopping basket when somebody uses your product, you can structure the revenue that, you know, you structure the charges based on a percentage of increase of the basket or something.

Alan Jones
So they'd probably be asking some questions around that.

Olivya Munro
Gotcha. Yeah, no, interesting. At the moment we charge per month, per fitting room on a subscription basis. But, what you're saying there about the basket size, that's a very interesting one. And that's how I've sold the proposition as well.

Olivya Munro
So

Alan Jones
Yeah,

Olivya Munro
That's a good one to think about.

Alan Jones
When you're selling to tech-resistant industries. And, so like. Fashion and a lot of other retail right now is really under pressure as we know there are brands and retailers shutting down all the time and they're just kind of trying to squeeze out as much value as they can out of whatever budget they have left to spend.

Alan Jones
Sometimes, the risk of spending a little bit more in order to make more is just too great. So sometimes if we can find a way to kind of structure our pricing so that if they win, we win. It makes them feel like they're taking less of a risk, or at least that our risk and their risk is aligned. Yeah. So if it works for them, it's going to work for us too.

Alan Jones
Another way to go is to get it out there and field on a free pilot basis for a little while, but that's going to be pretty expensive for you probably. And it's also, there's a risk there that, when people get something for free, They tend to either massively overutilise it or massively underutilise it, and both of those distortions mean that they get an unrealistic expectation of what, of the value that the product brings, and also you get to learn much less about the true use of a commercial product when it's being charged for.

Olivya Munro
Yeah.

Alan Jones
So I wouldn't recommend that in this case.

Olivya Munro
Yeah, no, interesting. No, thank you.

Alan Jones
So, maybe you could go out, you know, with a fixed price per fitting room. And people go, yeah. You can come back, okay, look, this is something I'm going to do just for you, just today. Don't tell any of your rivals, but could we work on a model where if I increase your average basket size, I'm able to charge you a percentage of that increase.

Olivya Munro
Yep. Yeah. No, it's a good idea. No, I never thought about it like that. So thank you.

Alan Jones
Oh, no worries. So I have one more question for you.

Olivya Munro
Yes.

Alan Jones
And that is if we invested a million dollars in your company to start building a team, what kind of employee would you hire first?

Olivya Munro
Oh, I think for us, we would really want to hire a killer software developer who's got some experience in, like design and UX as well.

Olivya Munro
We are going to be on a massive growth journey next year. We've already got five of Australia's biggest retailers in our pipeline. So someone who's also worked in the fashion retail or with fashion retailers before would be great. But yeah, anybody who has got some really strong experience working in the startup or scale-up space would also be really ideal.

Alan Jones
That's a great idea, Olivia. I like that a lot. Olivia, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Anyone who's interested in finding out more about Zello Studio can go to Zello, Z E L L O. S T U D I O dot co, that's Z E L L O S T U D I O dot co, ZelloStudio. co. Olivia, thanks so much for appearing on the show today.

Alan Jones
I'm really looking forward to following your journey on the Marseillaise.

Olivya Munro
Thank you, and thank you for having me.