Page 44 - AdNews Mar-Apr 2021

Meet the Team
“University became our largest and our core vertical that we serve really well,” Stronge tells AdNews.
“We’ve got probably close on 50 per cent of Australia’s universi- ties as our customers which is fan- tastic. Monash University and University of Sydney are still very happy customers five, six years later. We’ve replicated that successfully in the UK.”
During the past six months, the company has worked with red brick universities in the UK, including Imperial College London, Bristol University and Durham University.
It has also begun to grow its financial services customer base. One client, Aussie Home Loans, went through a significant rebrand. Its challenge was to f lawlessly roll it out while enabling more than 950 brokers to market its services and remain compliant to financial ser- vice regulation and the new brand.
Outfit helped Aussie’s market- ing team and brokers to create on-brand, compliant and localised marketing collateral for its retail stores and mobile brokers in minutes instead of days.
Since onboarding Outfit, brokers are equipped with a self-service tool that enables them to promote their services. The central marketing team is empowering the brokers while keeping the brand and regu- latory compliance in check, and everyone is saving a substantial amount of time in the process.
Like many businesses in the past year, Stronge admits it hasn’t been easy for Outfit but it has still achieved a lot for its customers.
Meetings and play at Outfit.
“I think what we’re proudest of is the lack of churn. We didn’t lose any customers in COVID-19,” he says.
“While we did grow our customer base, obviously the two years prior, we grew 100 per cent year-on-year in 2018 and 2019. Although that wasn’t the case during 2020, we’re really proud we’ve got a hand- ful of some of Australia’s iconic brands, including travel brands who we helped through COVID-19.
“And some of Australia’s largest real estate customers who, again, we helped through COVID-19; helping them cut costs and spend and work more efficiently with the distributed team.”
As their clients’ teams started to work from home, Stronge says Outfit played a vital role in helping marketers share consistent and empathetic brand messages to customers at scale.
“Suddenly all their teams were working from home,” he says. “So you’ve now got marketing teams at home going, ‘How do we carry on working and how do we produce enough content and iterate our brand messaging?’ Some of our customers asked us to do more personalised, empathetic messaging at scale to their customers during COVID-19.”
Before COVID-19 really took over 2020, Outfit made some exciting moves. In February, Stronge managed to raise $19.5 million in funding from US venture capitalists Five Elms for the company’s global expansion.
“I had been talking to Australian and US investors for two years,” he says.
“Ever since we did our seed round in January 2017, I’ve been building up relationships and every week I’d be having meetings with Australian and US sponsors to make sure we found the right people going forward. I got to know them really well in the 18 months, and then they got serious and eventually invested.
“We’re not looking to raise capital outside of Five Elms at this stage. Maybe in the future, when we do a large series B or series C, but they’re incredibly well funded.”
One of Outfit’s core focuses for 2021 will be on expanding into the US with the help of Five Elms. The venture capital firm has previously helped tech companies from South Africa, France, Spain and other countries scale into the US.
Its other big focus will be the launch of its second product, Make.cm. Stronge likens it to Twilio, a developer-first communications API offering, except for creative production.
“It’s Outfit’s developer-first offering,” he says. “We are offering to large organisations’ development teams the tools by which they can scaffold their own brand experiences. So, the engine behind Outfit and all the power of Outfit we’ve wrapped up in elegant APIs for development teams to assemble in their own way. It’s a less opinionated Outfit for developers to truly get the power.”