Juliet Potter: Autochick drives big online business

However varied their enterprises might be, our entrepreneurs have one thing in common: a never-say-die attitude. Juliet Potter is a prime example.

Success hasn’t come easy to Juliet Potter. She talks passionately about the struggle against seemingly impossible odds that paved the way to her new business, AutoChic, an online portal offering car information to women.

Her business resume has been chequered, to say the least. There was the career in advertising, followed by the makeup and wedding coordination businesses, but it wasn’t until she went shopping for car seat covers that Potter found her calling. Unhappy with the range on offer, she decided to create her own. Her design was a very popular jeans design—Diva Denim—that sold over the phone like hotcakes.

Then came the distribution into automotive stores. Sitting on the bottom of the shop shelves, wedged below the pink fluffy ones and the boring grey and black covers, Potter realised she needed a different selling model. She recognised that women are the most likely consumers to buy add-on products—“they buy the dress and take the shoes and jewellery”—so she thought she had the perfect sell for the male-dominated car companies.

By this time she had introduced other female-friendly products into the range, including lip-gloss that doesn’t melt, aromatherapy car freshener, and storage baskets, so she hit the car companies and dealerships offering to co-brand her products to target women buyers. They didn’t leap at the opportunity. “I saw every car company in Australia and not one of them took me up on the offer.”

So she decided to take the online route. Though it was set up mainly to take and manage online orders, Potter started to receive questions from customers about car maintenance and car buying tips. And while she had no idea how to answer the questions, she saw a big gap in the market. “When I started doing research I discovered that women are making the majority of the purchasing decisions when buying cars. It’s not like back in the 60s.

“They started asking me questions like what’s a greenslip? Or what’s the best insurance? Or what car should I buy?” she explains. At first she was confused about why they were asking her. “But then I realised it’s because women are so under-represented. And because they’d seen the cut-through of my products in Cleo or other women’s magazines they assumed I was a car expert. So Diva Denim became Diva Auto.”

Learning Curves

As the online forum grew, Potter decided to switch focus from selling products to offering a complete car website targeting women. This site was SheDrives.com.au and it grew so quickly she needed to take on a business partner. “I was in a position where the banks wouldn’t touch me. I was a mum, I was starting a new business and they wouldn’t lend me any money.” So she took on a partner and gave away a 51 percent stake in the business.

This is where things started to go wrong. When the partnership turned sour, Potter sold her share in the business. “The irony was that I wasn’t empowered in my own business, so I had to resign as a director.”

Walking away from SheDrives was heartbreaking, Potter says, but she knew she needed to get back some control. With her son sick in hospital and a three-year-old to take care of, Potter found herself standing in the dole queue. There she realised she could start again, so she walked away from the queue and set up a meeting with potential investors for her new brand, AutoChic.