Today you’re going to hear the story of Eat Your Water featuring Liam Scanlan.
Before we go back to the beginning, here’s where we are today, Liam has been named one of the top 50 people in e-commerce in the whole of Australia. In November 2019 alone over 100,000 people went through the Eat Your Water store and Eat Your Water has one of the lowest cost per purchases at 27 cents per purchase with an average order value of $56.
Very impressive numbers and Liam is an impressive guy and is only 23 years old. Now, let’s go back to day one where this story begins…
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Adam Spencer: You're listening to a DayOne.fm show.
Liam Scanlan: What drives you to make bold moves, to build something that didn't exist before, to live, lead, and choose life with intention? Welcome to Perspective X. I'm Pauline Fatowi, and this is not your typical business podcast. Each episode, I get to speak to extraordinary entrepreneurs and leading innovators to unpack what truly fuels their journey. Not just the wins, but the inner work, the overlooked decisions, the mindset shifts, and the personal moments that sparked something bigger. This show is about the ripple effect of choice, the kind of deep accountability that lets us respond to life rather than react to it. Because when you realize everything is temporary, and you are the creator of your own experience, you start to play the game differently. So if you're curious about how people build meaning alongside success, how they evolve through challenges and shape the world with intention, this is your invitation to listen in. Perspective X, where we go beyond the highlight reel and into the moments that changed everything. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker C: Well, 'cause I didn't tell my parents that I started the business, and they only started to get suspicious as the boxes were getting bigger and bigger showing up at the front door, asking what that was, so.
Adam Spencer: Hi, welcome to Day One, the show for regional startups and the organizations that support them. Today's episode was made in part by the support of New Economy Media, publisher of The New Economy News, Innovation news without the jargon. Read more at neweconomy.media. Also, thank you to Welcome to Day One's newest patron, Murray Herbst, and I'm very grateful to our existing patrons who have supported the show and our mission on Patreon. It means a great deal. Thank you very much. I'm Adam Spencer, and today I'm going to share with you the story of Eat Your Water. Eat your what?
Speaker C: Even though I say Eat Your Water and people go, "Eat your what?" I think it sticks and people look at it and, you know, it attracts attention.
Adam Spencer: With its founder, Liam Scanlan.
Speaker C: My name is Liam Scanlan. I'm the founder and director of Eat Your Water, one of Australia's fastest growing and largest independent surf brands.
Adam Spencer: Before we go back to the beginning, here's where we are today. Liam has been named one of the top 50 people in e-commerce in the whole of Australia. In November 2019 alone, over 100,000 people went through the Eat Your Water store, and Eat Your Water has one of the lowest cost per purchases at 27 cents per purchase, with an average order value of $56. Very impressive numbers, and Liam is an impressive guy and is only 23 years old. Now let's go back to day one. Where this story begins. We start this story on Liam's very first day of university.
Speaker C: I got an average ATAR and I got into marine biology.
Adam Spencer: Liam was in his car on his way back home from Newcastle University's Arimba campus where he had just sat through his first lecture and something wasn't sitting quite right with him.
Speaker C: I pulled over and I called my mum and I said, "This isn't for me." So that was a shock to the system, realising on the very first day something that I thought I wanted to do, that I spent 5 years studying to essentially lead to, that that wasn't what I was going to do. It literally, in one day, in an hour, in a 1 or 2 hour lecture, I was like, this is not what I want to actually do.
Adam Spencer: During this time, Liam had been working as a checkout chick at a supermarket, and he had become so accustomed to people's routines, to the point that he knew what they were coming in to buy before they bought it. And so much so that he decided then and there that he didn't want that kind of life, that normal 9 to 5. Then, 3 weeks later.
Speaker C: One day I was sitting outside Pinkies, which is a small convenience store on the Callaghan campus, and I literally opened up an Instagram page, I downloaded a logo designer app on my phone and ordered 3 designs for 3 t-shirts from Vistaprint, and then it all went from there. I honestly had no idea what I was doing. So I ordered the t-shirts and they came in, and It was literally me on Google learning how to do everything. I remember I got those 3 t-shirts and I did a giveaway for them to start getting some interest. Then I ordered maybe, I think, 15 t-shirts of this one design. And I had 3,000, roughly 3,000 followers at the time. And a lot of interest was sort of happening around this design. I put it up online and told everyone and then the post started getting likes and there were literally no sales. So I think I told people about 6 o'clock and then I think at about 9:30 my first sale came in. So it took 3.5 hours with 3,000 followers to sell one t-shirt, which I don't think people sort of realize. They go, you know, 3,000 followers, you should be selling a fair few as it is, which sort of made me realize that it's going to be a difficult slog. And then I think the next day I sold 2. So, but it was literally just learning from there.
Adam Spencer: Liam only invested a total of $1,500 into the business, and that was over the course of 3 months at the very start.
Speaker C: Because I only ever invested $1,500 and never invested another cent in the business. And then it was just constantly reinvesting, saving my money, and not taking any money out of the business for 2.5 years. And I think that's sort of an error that a lot of startups, especially in the fashion industry, have. They wanna have a quick return on buck, but you, I guess one thing I've learned is you gotta sell a hell of a lot of t-shirts to be able to pay yourself. I guess it was just learning how to get people engaged with it. With a concept that they thought was a business and getting them excited about it. So the timeline, it was probably March was when I started it and it was a drawn-out process and that $1,500 that I was sort of talking about, that was probably spent within 3 months. And that was sort of once we got that first batch of t-shirts in. $1,500 in hindsight was about $1,200 more than what I needed to spend but I didn't know what I was doing so I was just spending sort of like crazy. Yeah. And yeah, it sort of just went from there.
Adam Spencer: But Liam doesn't regret spending more than he probably needed to.
Speaker C: I wasn't worried about spending the money, especially I didn't have, that was pretty much all my savings. So like I had no savings. I bought a combi van when I was 16 years old and I saved really well up until that stage. I got the combi van and then I became terrible at saving, which hopefully is sort of, I'm saving well again now, but Yeah, I guess $1,500 felt like a fair bit of a whack, but one thing I try to stress to as many, especially younger people that I can, is that when you're young, you don't actually have that many responsibilities. You don't have a mortgage, you don't often have a mortgage or a family, for instance. So your responsibilities are pretty low. So there wasn't as much risk, I guess, at the time when I put $1,500 in. And you know, in hindsight, $1,500 is not much.
Adam Spencer: A new small independent surf brand versus the big boys like Rip Curl, Billabong, and Quiksilver. How do you even do that? Liam, Liam had a plan.
Speaker C: Despite I had very few products, like I literally had 3 products, I made it look like we had a lot and that we were sold out. So Eat Your Water from the start was really trying to make it look like we, and this is something that I see extremely important in business, and we still do it today. And like, was doing it a year ago and so on, but it's to, to actually give your customers a reason to buy from you. Like, you, we obviously have like different values and things like that, but we needed to make it look like we were just like any other huge surf brand.
Adam Spencer: As he sold each batch of t-shirts, he would reinvest that money back into the business to purchase more stock.
Speaker C: Pretty much as soon as I sold them, it was start doing new designs and get the next lot in, and that maybe took another 3 months.
Adam Spencer: And then it was simply rinse and repeat for the next 9 months, continuing to reinvest in the business and grow the marketing channels.
Speaker C: It was sort of an interesting first year. So if we go March to March, I'm pretty sure within that first 12 months we'd amassed around 25,000 followers on Instagram, and we sort of ignored every other social media platform there was. But during that sort of year, I was lucky 'cause this was when the Instagram algorithm was very, very different and very, very basic to what it is now.
Adam Spencer: Sales were going up as Eat Your Water's marketing channels continued to grow, but it wasn't until Liam took his own advice around looking bigger than you are that sales really started to pick up.
Speaker C: Probably that first year, maybe 2 years, it was very linear. It was sort of like, it was sort of just like, there wasn't a huge excess of sales just 'cause we were getting more followers. It wasn't until I really started to toy with new ideas of how to actually get stock in. So rather than, probably this is where something I did extremely well and extremely right was rather than ordering, spending my stock budget on 1 or 2 designs, I spent it on maybe 8 designs but in extremely low quantities. So I was able to once again go back to that thing where we looked bigger than what we were. Looked like we had a lot of designs, even though there weren't many of them. It meant that if a design flopped, um, I wasn't losing a lot of money, but if a design went really well, I was getting a lot more feedback from my customers.
Adam Spencer: Second year in, things really started to pick up, and what would become one of Liam's biggest adversaries began to make itself known: keeping up with demand.
Speaker C: So that was sort of the first year, but I guess when you sort of get to 25,000 followers, the supply versus demand was something that was difficult to keep up with 'cause followers aren't actually bringing in money. And because I never invested another cent and never got a loan, it was sort of like this loop of I had to keep ordering stock in batches that were getting incrementally bigger, but the demand was actually getting even bigger and bigger as we were going. And it's still to this day, it's a struggle keeping up with demand versus supply. Like it's December now and I think 16 or 17 of the 21 caps that we have on our website are currently sold out, and that's going into the busiest time of the year. So, and that's the whole battle with the supply chain, which is sort of my arch nemesis because it's this thing that we're always tightening and tightening and getting better and better, but it's this chase for the eternal perfect supply chain.
Adam Spencer: Liam's marketing channels have grown quite a bit since that fateful day out the front of Pinky's.
Speaker C: There's definitely ones that are more prominent than others, but there'd be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Vimeo, Twitter, Snapchat, so 7.
Adam Spencer: But Instagram remains the strongest channel, followed by people searching for the brand on Google, and Facebook is coming in third, as Liam has just recently began to put more focus on it.
Speaker C: I would have had Facebook at the same time, but it was very sort of bare, the Facebook page. Maybe like 1,000 likes. Now I think it's at 25,000-ish, which I've started to put a push to. We sort of got to, naturally when you're running campaigns, you just get likes ticking over. So I think up until about 20,000, it was just like from the background ads running. But in the past sort of month, I've just started to push more dollars towards it to actually extend the reach on Facebook. And so you can see this cool sort of insights on Facebook and you can compare yourself to competitors. So in terms of page likes and impressions, we're growing at 4.7%. Our closest competitor is growing at 0.1%.
Adam Spencer: Social media has been a major force for Liam and Eat Your Water. I want to say it comes naturally to Liam because he makes it look so easy, but he has spent countless hours learning every aspect of it and has spent even more time simply using it. Even in high school, Liam was able to build a following on Instagram of 12,000 people or more. Liam was recently named one of the top 50 people in e-commerce in Australia, partly due to the fact of Eat Your Water's insanely effective social media presence and advertising.
Speaker C: It was this point in time where I didn't really know what I was doing. I was doing this just subconsciously, but it's something that I think was pivotal in how Eat Your Water has gone to where it was today. I think roughly at the same time was when I really started to get into Facebook and Instagram marketing, so paid advertising. And that's been the next pivotal thing for me. So, like earlier this year, I was named one of the top 50 people in e-commerce in the whole of Australia. So I came number 41. And pretty much the reason for that was one, the conversion rate increase over the year. And then two, we also have extremely, we probably have one of the lowest cost per purchases in the whole of Australia for fashion. So at that time it was 30 cents per purchase for one of our campaigns, and this year we've got it down to 27 cents per purchase. So it costs us 27 cents to get someone to spend roughly $56, which is our average order value.
Adam Spencer: But Liam believes it isn't just Facebook and Instagram that has allowed Eat Your Water to get to where it is. And in fact, Liam told me that if someone else run the exact same ads, he doesn't think they'd be as effective because the most important thing is the brand and your product.
Speaker C: The biggest issue that I see with most businesses trying to come up, it's their brand and their product or service. That's the first thing. So yeah, like a few people have come to me and said, hey, we should start essentially a consultancy business or a marketing business. And I said, well, often the issue isn't their marketing, it's their brand and image. And I feel like, you know, you can't just, simply cookie cutter an approach from a business to business when you look at their brand. And it's a hard thing to do because you've built, often business owners have built their brand themselves 'cause they haven't invested the money because it's bloody expensive to get a custom brand built. My first two were done on a pro, like a logo maker, an app. My dad got an iPad Mini through work that he didn't use, so I sort of just made that my own. And then I drew the Earwater logo with my finger on an iPad Mini. Never been touched since. Yeah.
Adam Spencer: And over time, the brand has evolved. Eat Your Water today is continuing to differentiate itself from its competitors and aligning itself even closer to its customers' values.
Speaker C: I realized that it is important, and as I've grown up and I've looked at what's happening in, I guess, more the political and business space, you start to realize that there isn't enough action happening, and it's a huge value for our customers that they hold dearly, so to sort of maximize and put that out there, and more and more now, The Eat Your Water journey is taking it to that more sustainable and even ethical, ethical place. And yeah, that's sort of just come from my upbringing, I guess. The ultimate goal for me is within 3 to 5 years is to get Eat Your Water to a place where it actually replenishes the earth and doesn't essentially diminish it, which not many, especially small fashion businesses, truly do.
Adam Spencer: There is no stopping Liam. I asked him if he feels successful and he said sometimes he does. But he also says, "Is anyone truly successful? Because there is always room to grow." And I think that that mindset has contributed largely to his success. There is no stopping Liam. I asked him if he feels successful, and he said sometimes he does, but he also says, "Is anyone truly successful? Because there is always room to grow." And I think that that mindset has contributed largely to his success. Just keep improving, and he's still doing that today, refining his processes, refining his supply chain, refining the customer journey.
Speaker C: Probably one thing that I've been fascinated about is the customer journey, so from when they pick up their phone to how they actually purchase something, and then like that whole after-purchase journey. So I guess I'm always looking at like I'm trying to be my customer and view and I'll go buy something on the website and go, well, what could be better about that? So for instance, when I knew all our stock was selling out fast and I knew people were clicking on a t-shirt, going in and finding out their size wasn't available, then they'd have to go back, find another t-shirt if they clicked on that. So what we did is we did this sort of overlay thing that they tap on there from the collection page and then they would see, okay, my size isn't available. So rather than having to go in, they just simply tap it once and it would show if their product— Mm-hmm. If the size is available. So we made that mobile-friendly and desktop-friendly, and that was simply just shortening the customer journey and decreasing essentially their frustration. So it's things like that. I always try to put myself in the customer sort of situation and see what our process is like, and it's constantly tweaking that.
Adam Spencer: And let's finish up the Eat Your Water story with Liam's best piece of advice.
Speaker C: Like I always say, you've gotta be persistent, but I don't know if that's That's right, because being persistent doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be successful because you see persistent, persistency can be just seen as doing the same thing over and over again. And if you're doing that and it's not working, you know, and I guess that comes back to like something with a brand for instance, if your brand's not working but you're persistent, so I guess it's persistent but consider outside view very heavily. Don't always take their view as correct. Probably my best piece of advice would be put yourself in your customer's shoes because without them, you're not gonna have a business.
Adam Spencer: Thank you for listening to the story of Eat Your Water featuring Liam Scanlan. I hope you enjoyed it. Everything that was mentioned in the episode today is on the show notes page on welcometodayone.com. If you enjoyed this story, please consider subscribing to the podcast and rating this show at Ratedayone.com. And if you really love the show, then I invite you to help us continue to tell these stories and supporting Australian startups by pledging your support at Patreon. You can do that by going to WelcomeToDayone.com/Patreon. Thank you for giving this episode of Welcome Welcome to Day One, your attention. This story was created by me, Adam Spencer. Interviews conducted by me, Adam Spencer, and a big thank you to Liam Scanlan for taking the time to be involved. The script was written by me, Adam Spencer. Music by Lee Rosevear. Full attribution on our website at welcometodayone.com. This episode was produced and edited by me, Adam Spencer. Thank you and see you next time.
