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Woman Built $47 Million Company Without Her Parents Knowing She'd Quit Her Accounting Job

Woman Built $47 Million Company Without Her Parents Knowing She'd Quit Her Accounting Job

The Australian businesswoman has been named on AFR’s Young Rich List every year since 2017

Anish Vij

Anish Vij

A woman from Australia managed to secretly build a $47 million (£34m) company without her parents knowing she quit her accounting job at a well-known firm.

Jane Lu is the fashion guru that started selling clothes online in 2010 and she kept it hidden from her parents for two years, as per NY Post.

Her business, Showpo is now known as a global online fashion brand that focuses on 'offering an inclusive range of trend-driven styles designed exclusively in Australia'.

Instagram/@thelazyceo

Jane's parents Queenie, 61, and Frank Lu, 67, migrated from China when she was eight years old and worked as cleaners in Sydney.

The businesswoman found it difficult to tell them she wanted to quit her role at Ernst & Young, a large, reputable accountancy firm in Australia, to set out on her own.

Jane told Financial Review: "I didn't know how to tell them so I pretended to keep going to work for the next six months.

"I would put on my suit every day. I would get the bus into the city with my mom. And I was carrying around an empty laptop bag.

Instagram/thelazyceo

"It was the worst. I was definitely questioning my life decisions a lot back then. But there was no going back."

Jane's initial business venture to start a pop-up shop stocking emerging designers didn't work out, but she turned things around when she took the business online.

She said: "The online fashion thing was only starting out but it was quickly getting bigger."

In the early days, she was hiding clothing stock for the website in garbage bags so her parents wouldn't find out about her change of career. She was also $60,000 (£43,000) in debt from the failure of the pop-up store.

However, she managed to successfully utilise social media to turn Showpo into a huge success.

Instagram/thelazyceo

Still, it was two years after quitting her accountancy job that Jane finally came clean to her parents.

She said: "They were shocked.

"They just couldn't believe how I had the balls. They're like we don't have anyone really entrepreneurial in our family. How did you know to take that risk?"

It was definitely a risk worth taking, since Jane was then in a position to pay off her parents' mortgage and buy them a car.

Showpo now has 1.8 million followers on Instagram, 1.3 million on Facebook and 95,700 on its newly launched TikTok page.

Now aged 35, Jane has now started a family and is seen as one of Australia's most successful self-made businesswomen.

Featured Image Credit: Alamy

Topics: Business, Australia