UC Leavers: Tasmanian business innovation

At Startup Tasmania we try to encourage innovative local businesses and Uniform City is a great example of how existing Tasmanian businesses can evolve and innovate to reach new markets via the web.  

Outside of Startup Tasmania, I work at a Ionata, a Hobart web design company. This post is about how one of Ionata’s customers, Uniform City, is innovating to reach out to national markets taking advantage of the Internet and social media via the UC Leavers website.

The killer feature is that students can design their leavers top online and share them with friends via Facebook.

Who are Uniform City?

Uniform City are an established Tasmanian uniform supplier delivering school ware, sports uniforms and branded corporate ware. What makes them unique is they manufacture locally allowing them to create high quality bespoke garments in smaller quantities than their competitors.

One key market for Uniform City is school leavers tops. Since they can weave the fabric to suit requirements on site they can deliver the exact colours and stripes required, then cut and stitch, add any kind of branding and individual top names.

The results are high quality garments designed exactly to client requirements.

Challenges when selling school leavers tops
One key challenge is the time and effort required to sell to schools. It’s a high-touch, labor intensive sales process.

How are they innovating?
Uniform City saw a market opportunity to sell school leavers tops online. This is a game changer for three reasons:

• Bigger market: they can reach a national audience
• Better cost structure: customers can self-serve online
• Better customer experience: It’s a more engaging process

So the formulae is: bigger market + less sales costs + better experience = a compelling reason to try something new.

Check out the new UC Leavers website
You can jump online now and see the UC Leavers website here:
http://ucleavers.com.au/

The killer feature (and reason Ionata is proud of this project) is the online leavers top designer. Students can immediately jump in and make interesting and realistic school leavers top designs and share them with friends. You can choose what type of top you want, customise it with stripes and school colours, add logos and messages.

To further enable the uptake of users to the UC Leavers site, students can use their Facebook account to login to so they never have to remember a password, sharing their designs with their Facebook friends, posting a thumbnail of the top right on their Facebook wall for comments from classmates with a single click.

To ensure ease of usability, the website uses no Flash at all so can be viewed on iPad or iPhone, taking advantage of the increasing use of mobile devices to access social media.

The system also includes a full ordering and fulfillment business process.

Whilst Uniform City has long held market share in Tasmania thanks to their innovation, customer service and reputation for quality, access to the expansive markets of school leavers nationally through Ionata’s clever e-commerce solution is now a reality.

Vote for UC Leavers

Help UC Leavers win an AWW award for UC Leavers by voting online (click a number under User Vote to the right of the screenshot).

[button link="http://www.awwwards.com/best-websites/uc-leavers-design-your-own-school-leavers" type="big" color="red"] Vote for UC Leavers[/button]